Why didn’t Symantec’s acquisition of Veritas work? At the time, it was touted as bringing security and storage together. EMC did the same with RSA at the time. So what happened?

I alluded to it earlier, which is first, it was a huge cultural mismatch that I did not envision, quite frankly. There was a component part of the Veritas team that viewed Symantec not as a security company, but a consumer company. That enterprise group did not want to be a part of a consumer company, and it just created more tension than I ever thought would ever evolve, if you will, from the integration. But then I think also, many people who were buying big backup and recovery solutions weren’t as focused back then on managing the content itself and securing the content as part of an integrated process. And so that was a step in the journey where people went, ‘Whoa, why are they doing that?’ And I just wish it had turned out better. But I think had we not encountered the cultural problems and had done it at the right moment in time, it clearly would have been an early Rubrik, for sure.

So what’s changed since then in terms of making companies like Rubrik able to bring the security component to secure the content along with doing data protection?

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.

So what is Rubrik’s claim to fame? What’s its differentiator from what you’ve seen so far?

Well, I think it is they have done an amazing job of integrating security, certainly around ransomware and elements of that, into their backup and recovery platform. Ironically enough, as the COVID pandemic hit, one of the big things that occurred was ransomware spread. I mean, Rubrik was booking literally dozens and dozens and dozens of customers a week because of all of the ransomware problems that were going on in the early days of COVID. And candidly, that’s helped the company expand its purpose, if you will, around secure content management.