Storage News
John Thompson On Helping Rubrik Scale And Prepare For An IPO
Joseph F. Kovar
‘Quite frankly, everything is in the cloud in some form or another these days. Clients want to make sure that they have something that can protect their content wherever it exists, wherever it lives, if you want, be it in the cloud or on-prem or quite frankly in a partner’s ecosystem. They want a company like Rubrik who can not only ensure that it is secure but make sure that the content can be stored in a way that makes it reliable as it gets accessed,’ says John Thompson, who this month was named lead independent director of Rubrik’s board of directors.
Congratulations on your new directorship at Rubrik.
I am delighted to have the new role. But quite frankly, it’s not going to change what I do one iota. I am there to help Bipul and his team scale this company. And while being the lead independent director is important, and it certainly will become more important as the company starts to think about its journey toward an IPO, candidly, right now, it’s about building a business of scale. And that’s what I’m here to help them do.
You mentioned the journey toward an IPO. What is Rubrik’s timeline on that?
We don’t have a definitive date when we would do it. But clearly the company’s performance has yielded the kind of outcome that we had expected. And candidly, we don’t see anything in the coming year or so that’s going to change that substantially. And so we’ll see how the market behaves. It’s more about the market than the company.
The last couple of years have seen storage vendors like Rubrik rebrand themselves more as security vendors or security specialists. You ran Symantec when it acquired Veritas to bring security and storage together. So what’s going on in this market today?
I think what we are starting to see is that security is more about securing the content, not just the infrastructure or the devices themselves. And candidly, what Rubrik has done is has evolved to help customers migrate to the cloud but to do it in a way that their content is far, far, far more secure. When I first got introduced to Bipul, I was running a Lightspeed Venture Partners company that did not pan out well, but nonetheless, that was what I was doing. When he came in, he said, ‘I have this idea. I want to integrate backup and recovery and security.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s exactly what I wanted to try to accomplish when we bought Veritas.’ But the cultural mismatch between the two companies, and quite frankly, the moment in time where we were, just wasn’t perfect for that particular acquisition.
Nonetheless, what’s happened at Rubrik over time is the company has moved from an appliance that sits on-prem that helps decide which way to move data to the cloud or keep it on-prem, and oh, by the way, secure it at every stitch along the way. And it’s just been an amazing journey for the company. And now they move from candidly an on-prem hardware appliance to a cloud-based service that is growing exponentially every quarter.
