Rubrik CEO: “Data is the new IP”

How strategic is the Middle East market for you?

If you look at the trend of digitisation happening all around the world, especially in the Middle East, you have a young population, a lot more telecom, robust financial services and rapid digitisation of government services, which is resulting in a massive boom in data.  How you manage that data, particularly for recovery so that your applications are up and running all the time, how do you provision data, how do you access it, and how do you ensure that there are no compliance violations are all becoming far more critical than ever. All aspects of data are Rubrik’s business, and the Middle East is a massive market for us.

Do you think of data as the new oil?

I’d take a little bit of different approach. Oil is a very important commodity that you can exchange with people and get value for it; data is your company’s internal strength. I’d say data is the new Intellectual Property (IP). Every business needs to have IP around data, and you will not have a business without it. Today, businesses are getting technology-enabled, and if you don’t know how to use data, you will be left behind.

What is your approach to data management?

When we started, our goal was to create a comprehensive data management platform. But, some of the data platform thinking we had back then was ahead of the market. We wanted first to solve the foundation platform, which is backup and recovery. Once we start to manage data on behalf of our customers, then we can leverage algorithms, analytics, and ML to deliver products and services on top of data. That’s why we decided to focus on backup and recovery, and we simplified it in a new architecture that combines data and metadata.

Rubrik offers an all-in-one appliance that combines backup, recovery, and deduplication. Is it like a hyperconverged box?

The term hyperconvergence has been used and abused. We are a data management company, not an infrastructure company. Whether you want to keep your data on a hyperconverged platform or the cloud, we are the data management platform across everything. Think of us as the managers of data, not keepers of data.

Do you follow the scale-out architecture?

Rubrik is based on scale-out architecture, and it is where the world is moving to. It is all about fractional consumption and the ability to scale software and services incrementally. No one wants to buy three years ahead of time. The economic cycles are shrinking, and we are living in the age of just-in-time economy, and you need a scale-out architecture to grow incrementally.

Is storage also getting software-defined?

We are not a storage company, and we work with all storage vendors around us. What we see in the marketplace is that doing software-defined for the sake of it is not working. Businesses want to deliver the best quality of experience for their applications and end-users. What technology they use is immaterial to them- their goal is not to buy the best technology but how to deliver the best products and services to their customers. In this context, if you look at the shrinking business cycles and having to react faster to customer demands, the software-defined architecture allows them to have the elasticity and flexibility to grow their business and adjust to market demands.

Is backup to the cloud gaining steam now?

We introduced cloud backup five years ago, and the whole idea was – how do you connect your data centres to the public cloud? You need a single software fabric to manage both ends of the equations so that you have the flexibility for businesses to manage their backup and recovery onsite, and send data to the cloud, do DR, failover, and failback on the cloud. Ultimately, all businesses want to deliver better user experience, and you can’t do that if you don’t have the flexibility in your infrastructure and data management.