While there are some similarities with Commvault’s development of Metallic to provide a strong SaaS capability, Veritas has a different focus on how to best integrate the HubStor technology into their strategy.
Geoff Bourgeois, CEO of HubStor, which has been acquired by Veritas
Data protection vendor Veritas has significantly expanded their SaaS capabilities with the acquisition of HubStor, a SaaS backup and archiving provider with offices in Kanata – Ottawa’s west end. The plan is to ultimately fully integrate the company and its technology to strengthen the Veritas Enterprise Data Services Platform.
HubStor is an interesting story, in which two men, CEO Geoff Bourgeois and CTO Gregg Campbell, built an enterprise-focused SaaS backup platform while working from their homes, starting in 2015
“It’s certainly not something you see every day or even every decade,” Bourgeois said. “The new companies in this space are usually heavily VC-funded startups. We bootstrapped it ourselves. In the early days, we didn’t think two guys in their basements in the Manotick area would land big customers, but we did. We got a medical device provider in Michigan, then the state of Alaska, then a marine dredging company in the Netherlands. We were able to grow the business organically as a Work From Home startup, by being laser focused on what these customers wanted. We have gained traction in very large enterprises with dozens of PB of data. We also have customers with less than a TB of data. In terms of verticals, it’s all over the map. We are a very horizontal play.”
Bourgeois said that most of their differentiation has been in the enterprise. A key capability here is the ability to customize and tailor backup configurations to a more granular level, even down to individual items. Customers can also recover data through a simplified end-user self-service portal.
“In considering how to expand our SaaS capabilities I looked at doing it organically versus vs inorganically,” said Simon Jelley, General Manager for Veritas Backup Exec, EndPoint Protection and SaaS Protection. “We engaged with HubStor very early on, and spent six months plus understanding their capabilities. They have a very scalable, enterprise-driven platform, and we were impressed with the traction they have had in a very short period, especially in working with very large enterprises.”
The Enterprise SaaS backup-as-a-service market has seen considerable growth over the last couple of years, with new well-funded startups like Clumio joining ones established earlier in the last decade. The most obvious parallel to what Veritas is doing here is Commvault’s establishment of Metallic as a sub-brand designed to make a traditional on-prem enterprise data protection vendor a major SaaS player. Jelley sees a difference between Veritas’ plans for HubStor and Commvault’s strategy with Metallic, however.
Simon Jelley, General Manager for Veritas Backup Exec, EndPoint Protection and SaaS Protection
“We see our strategy more about how we continue to deliver our Veritas Enterprise Data Services Platform message,” he noted. “Bringing HubStor into the NetBackup portfolio extends that platform into key SaaS applications. They support Microsoft 365, Box and Slack now, and the plan within the next six months to a year is to further expand the Salesforce presence beyond Slack. This continues our messaging around the Enterprise Data Services platform being about protecting data wherever it may be and however the customer wishes to do it, by protecting those key SaaS applications.”
Jelley noted that Veritas has had SaaS capabilities before, some of which, in areas like governance, go back many years. NetBackup also has native SaaS capabilities, including CloudPoint.
“What HubStor adds is the ability to drive SaaS protection in our Enterprise Data Services Platform,” Jelley emphasized.
All of the HubStor team is coming over to Veritas. Jelley stressed that while Veritas will deepen investment to build out the road map more fully and faster, the long-term plan is to fully integrate the technology within the platform, not maintain it as a Metallic-style standalone.
“In the near term, we will run it as a separate unit within Veritas, but the real value is integrating it into the broader enterprise platform,” he said. “We will integrate it into our overall business model.”
Jelley said that the new capabilities would be a major plus for Veritas channel partners.
“Our partners are very critical to driving enterprise traction, and we are 100% reliant on it to drive that business for Veritas,” he stated.
