- Clumio — an innovator of authentic SaaS for enterprise backup — announced it raised $51 million in funding from leading Silicon Valley investors and launched a flagship backup product.
Clumio — an innovator of authentic SaaS for enterprise backup — recently announced it raised $51 million in funding from leading Silicon Valley investors. And the company also officially launched its flagship backup as a service product.
With the new service, enterprises can eliminate hardware and software for on-premise backup and avoid the complexity and cost of running third-party backup software in the cloud. By taking advantage of cloud-scale, economics, and elasticity, there is now a secure and efficient way to protect on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS, and native AWS service workloads.
Founded in 2017 by Poojan Kumar (co-founder and former CEO of PernixData, a company acquired by Nutanix), Woon Ho Jung, and Kaustubh Patil, Clumio is considered a secure, backup as a service that consolidates the protection of an enterprise data center and any remote sites with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage – or even buy at all.
“Enterprise workloads are being ‘SaaS-ified’ because IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing heavy on-prem hardware and software solutions if they are to successfully deliver against their digital transformation initiatives,” said Kumar. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have and can leverage the most secure and innovative cloud services available, now and in the future, within our service to ensure that we can meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”
The $51 million in funding was spread across two rounds: a Series A round led by Sutter Hill and a Series B round driven by Index Ventures with significant participation from Sutter Hill Ventures. And several investors like Mark Leslie (founder of Veritas Technologies) and John Thompson (chairman of the board at Microsoft) also joined the round.
“In our business, IT is a differentiator so we look to SaaS offerings for reliability, scalability, and simplicity,’” added Marcus Johnston, the Chief Security Officer at Infogix. “The Clumio backup as a service offering removes infrastructure complexity from day to day operations by providing cloud-native backup and an easy to use management interface for our workloads. Our developers can now focus on building the apps that deliver the most business value to us.”
As enterprises move much more aggressively to cloud, they can use Clumio to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS, and native AWS services. And authentic SaaS protects data regardless of where it resides and delivers these benefits to the enterprise: 1.) Easy to Manage (setup and start protecting your data in less than 15 minutes) 2.) Predictable Costs (pay for the service based on the number of VMs protected), 3.) Scale On-Demand (resources automatically adapt to meet requirements), 4.) Global Compliance (create one policy to apply to VMs on-premise and in the cloud), and 5.) Always-On Security (all backups are encrypted in-transit, and at rest).
According to IDC, the global market for SaaS applications revenues is expected to increase from approximately $100 billion in 2018 to more than $185 billion by 2021. Clumio is positioned to take advantage of this trend thus giving enterprises a fast and effective way to make progress against organizational mandates to move workloads to the cloud or minimize the amount of time they spend on applications and operations that are not core to their businesses. And the Data Protection as a Service market – which includes spending on backup and disaster recovery cloud services – will grow to over $10 billion by 2022. Enterprises have already moved CRM, IT service management, HR, and data warehouse workloads to the cloud. And Clumio’s mission is to do the same for this large market.
“No longer do organizations need to purchase single-purpose hardware and software for backup and recovery requirements,” explained Andrew Smith, a research manager at IDC Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies Group. “In many cases, they can quickly and cost-efficiently rely on cloud services. As a result of this consumption change, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in thinking in terms of the best way for IT and line of business buyers to leverage cloud services for workloads like backup and disaster recovery. As a result of this shift, we forecast that the backup as a services market will experience a double-digit compound annual growth rate over the next 5 years – far outpacing the growth of the traditional data replication and protection software segment.”
Without having to deal with hardware and software logistics, implementation, and costs, Clumio’s channel partners and solutions providers are able to focus more directly on solving the problems of their enterprise customers, quickly transitioning their own business models to take advantage of the cloud opportunity in the process.
“As enterprise companies have increasingly turned to public cloud to solve business problems and deliver business value, it also becomes necessary for them to rethink data protection. Clumio delivers solutions that address backup and recovery on-prem and in the public cloud without planning, sizing and implementation complexities,” noted Groupware Technology CEO Mike Thompson.
