Storage News
HYCU Unveils R-Cloud Platform For SaaS Vendors To Build Data Protection
Joseph F. Kovar
‘We want to protect the world from a SaaS perspective, and there’s 17,000 different SaaS services. How can we do that? We certainly can’t build 17,000 different SaaS products. We certainly can’t build integrations into 17,000 companies. And that’s when lightning struck. It shouldn’t be us building 17,000 integrations. We should be a platform that allows 17,000 SaaS vendors to write to us,’ says HYCU founder and CEO Simon Taylor.
Since you’ve come up with R-Cloud, have you had any SaaS vendors take advantage of it yet?
Absolutely. A lot of people ask me why Atlassian invested in HYCU. And the reason is because they knew what we were doing with R-Cloud. And they said, ‘My goodness, we have so many Atlassian products and we absolutely have this real problem, we have a real need for this. So if we can use leverage R-Cloud, we’d love to do that.’ And in fact, in our first release, you’ll see that integrations for both Atlassian Jira and Atlassian Confluence are already in the app store.
A lot of people also ask why Okta Ventures invested in a data protection company. You know, I explained R-Cloud to Okta, they said, ‘Ah, so you’re going to integrate with Okta in order to build that R-Graph tree so you can actually figure out and automatically discover these customers’ environments.’ We patented that approach, in fact, because it was such a unique way of leveraging single sign-on to provide additional value. And we think there’s a much larger partnership with Okta in the works as well.
You think there is a larger partnership with Okta? You would know.
There is.
Total investment in HYCU so far is over $100 million. Any plans for further funding rounds?
Our goal is to build a multigenerational company that goes the distance and is ultimately able to IPO. Right now, we’re just heads-down-focused on great growth, and focused on bringing R-Cloud to really democratize data protection worldwide. And I think if we can do that, the sky’s the limit in terms of what our optionality will be for next steps in terms of funding.
HYCU has never made an acquisition. Could you do so in the future?
We certainly could. With R-Cloud, when we think about the 17,000 SaaS vendors, there’s probably 150 or 200 of them that are really the top top tier. And our goal is to make sure we can get to scale as fast as possible with R-Cloud so we can provide true end-to-end coverage of our customers’ data states. And in those cases where we see acquisition optionality, we’ll certainly be considering that.
