Rubrik claims backup rivals are looking for a 'Rubrik killer'

Rubrik WEUR sales director Alex Raistrick says traditional backup and recovery vendors are scared of its offering as it hunts down their market share.

Converged data management vendor Rubrik has hit a $100m revenue runrate as traditional back-up and recovery vendors search for a ‘Rubrik killer', according to its western Europe boss Alex Raistrick.

Founded in 2013, Rubrik offers data protection, back-up and disaster recovery solutions that it claims are gaining traction in replacing backup vendors such as Commvault and Data Domain.

Speaking to CRN Raistrick said the vendor currently has an annual runrate of $100m and is starting to scare the vendors that have traditionally dominated the space.

"There's one vendor who, in their eyes, have started to try and design a ‘Rubrik killer'," he said. "That's how much of a threat we are to them, and there is another vendor who has just had a worldwide call on how to combat the Rubrik threat, so for us that is great validation.

"None of these companies really have an answer to what we do because you can't be an established technology company, with thousands of customers, and suddenly make a change in direction and develop a new product from scratch. We have this first-mover advantage where we're well ahead of the game with the technology and our goal is to absolutely disrupt that market and take business away from traditional vendors."

Chief technology evangelist at Rubrik Chris Wahl explained that Rubrik offers a solution which sits alongside a primary storage vendor and eradicates the need for separate vendors in areas like backup, second storage and disaster recovery.

"[An end user would] have Nutanix, or whatever, for primary and Rubrik, then you're done," he said. "You don't need to buy from four, five, six different vendors and plug it all together, you just buy Rubrik and that provides the entire stack of solutions."

UK

Rubrik launched in EMEA and the UK last year - with a London office set to open imminently - and now has around 20 UK partners, Raistrick said.

He explained that the vendor is not seeing traction in one particular vertical, but that end-users are becoming increasingly frustrated with managing a number of different vendors for backup and disaster recovery - a problem which he claims Rubrik solves.

"Most of those relationships are quite toxic when it comes to the technology," he said. "They all have problems.

"We have not come across anyone yet who has said ‘I really love my existing back up product'.

"If you think about it the front-end piece, the production technology has advanced very quickly to service different needs, but backup hasn't changed. It's trying to do a job with a completely different front-end production environment and it doesn't work very well."

Rubrik partner Assured Data Protection (ADP) was formed last year by the team behind disaster recovery firm Backup Technology to focus purely on Rubrik's technology.

Simon Chappell, co-founder at ATP, said that the firm is seeing a lot of success displacing a number of vendors in an end-user infrastructure with a purely Rubrik solution.

"It's so far in advance of anything else that is in the market, particularly in the data protection space," he said.

"A lot of people might be cobbling together Zerto for disaster recovery; a legacy Commvault for backup; they may have Veeam for some virtualised backup - we see a lot of people that have pieced together technologies to try and make things work, where clearly what we're saying is ‘put Rubrik in and eliminate all of those'.

"We see a lot of it where someone like NetApp will sell a secondary storage platform as a potential disaster recovery or potential backup - Rubrik replaces that.

"It starts as a data protection piece but effectively it becomes data management because of the ease with which you can manage databases. We've had a lot of success with that and are talking to a lot of people about their testing and development environments."