Which vendor refused to go direct for 'the world's largest social networking company'?

Backup vendor reveals how it insisted social media giant used a channel partner to buy its product

Rubrik refused to break its 100 per cent channel policy when "the world's largest social networking company" came knocking on its door asking it to sell direct, according to CEO Bipul Sinha.

Speaking to CRN, Sinha reaffirmed the vendor's commitment to its channel partners, saying it wouldn't break protocol even for the social media giant.

"I'll give you an example, without naming names," he said.

"The world's largest social networking company wanted to buy a Rubrik product and we said that we don't sell direct," he explained.

"They never work with channel partners… so we introduced one of our channel partners to them.

"It took them two months to do the paperwork, and we had two months with a commitment from such a company, before we could do the deal. We are that committed to this model."

Since launching in 2014, Rubrik has raised $292m (£215m) in funding and is planning to go public in the next few years.

According to Sinha, Rubrik now has a revenue run rate of $150m and is valued at $1.3bn - taking it past the point where other vendors would look to snap it up.

The roots of the company, however, are different to many start-ups - with Sinha leaving his job as a venture capitalist to found and run Rubrik.

"I'm an engineer by training. I used to work at Oracle, building Oracle databases, before going to business school and venture capital," he said.

"As a venture capitalist you always look for markets that are underserved by incumbents.

"If you look at IT in enterprise in general, there are not a lot of areas where innovation has not happened and I feel that backup is one of the last areas where there has been no innovation in the last 10 years. I saw an opportunity where you have an identified budget every year, you have identified buyers, and identified buying centres.

"Once I saw that, even being in VC, within a day I thought 'I'm totally wasting my time because I can create an impactful company'."

Sinha explained that Rubrik has seen such success since its launch because it is a simple solution to a problem experienced by all enterprises, despite being met with resistance from other vendors when they launched their products.

"We're not evangelising a new architecture, we're not evangelising a new way of thinking, we are evangelising a fast, effective way to simplify something that [customers] want to do," he said.

"We believed that if we combined the backup software and storage into a single software, and if we took an angle of virtualised infrastructure, then we could disrupt the market.

"This is something we fundamentally believed which the market didn't believe. I still remember when we came out with a Rubrik appliance product, one of the evangelists at Veeam did a radio show saying 'I've been in the industry for 20 years, there is no way an appliance-based solution will succeed'. Our solution is not about the appliance, it's about simplicity."

Sinha said that Rubrik going public is in the pipeline, but is by no means the ultimate objective.

"It's not a goal, it's a milestone," he said. "We want to define this market and be the cloud data-management platform for the world.

"Going public is going to give us more market position and also the currency to continue to scale the business."