It’s only a matter of time until storage vendor Rubrik has its long-expected IPO. And news today of some personnel and revenue milestones will only add to that feeling.

A-Grade board addition

Love it or hate it, it’s hard to argue that Microsoft is one of the most successful technology companies both in terms of longevity and value created. So the fact that the chairman of the board of Microsoft, John W Thompson, is joining the Rubrik board is some seriously big news. People like Thompson don’t waste their time on companies that aren’t going somewhere, they also look to deploy their time into high-velocity operations, something that Rubrik (see news below) seems to be delivering.

Matched with A-Grade exec additions

A great board is no good if there isn’t the executive team to deliver the good and Rubrik is hiring up in this regard, as well. The company has appointed Murray Demo as their CFO. Prior to Rubrik, Demo was CFO at Atlassian, a very different company from Rubrik, but one which has traversed the IPO process and seen some impressive early results in its new guise as a public company. Alongside the most recent Atlassian experience, Demo has previously served as CFO at Adobe, LiveOps and Dolby Laboratories.

The only flipside is, of course, the incessant jokes that Rubrik sales staffers are going to hear when they try and schedule a product demo. I can almost hear the “Oh, you’re going to send us your CFO?” heckles coming thick and fast.

Slurping in dollars

Rubrik is all about slurping in data off legacy storage as fast as possible. We all know that storage is a very lucrative market and it would seem that Rubrik’s slurping is paying dividends. The company is close (they don’t say how close, but what’s a few million between friends) to surpassing a $300 million run rate. That’s a lot of sales for an early stage company.

Success with all the other components of a modern technology vendor

Director, CFO, revenue. It’s all good. The company is announcing a few other metrics which all paint a very appealing IPO picture:

  • Accelerating global customer growth: Over the past fiscal year, Rubrik grew its global customer base by more than 4x. Customers include two of the top five biotech companies in the world, three of the top five media companies, two of the top three real estate companies, and more.
  • New customers include Barrett Steel, Elenia, France Télévisions Publicité, Frost Bank, Flagstar Bank, JE Dunn, Medatixx, Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula 1, NWS Holdings Limited, Secure24, Sphero, Tradeweb Europe, Stora Enso, UC San Diego, and University of Reading.
  • Channel success: Since day one, Rubrik has employed a 100% channel-driven go to market strategy. Over the past year, 86% of Rubrik transacting partners have more than doubled their business with Rubrik.
  • Deepened capabilities, expanded cloud partnerships, and Datos IO acquisition: The launch of Rubrik Alta delivered instant application availability for any app, anywhere. Rubrik released market-leading capabilities to facilitate workload migration, test/dev, and DR across all major public cloud providers. The company earned the AWS Storage ISV Partner Competency, was designated a global ISV co-seller through the Microsoft Partner Network, offering its solution on Microsoft Azure, and also announced support for Google Cloud Storage. Rubrik recently announced its acquisition of Datos IO, extending its reach into mission-critical cloud applications built on NoSQL databases that are increasingly deployed in Fortune 500 companies.
  • Geographical Expansion & Employee Growth: Rubrik is now over 800 employees strong across six continents, representing a 3x increase year over year. Over the past year, Rubrik opened 10 new offices in India, Ireland, Kansas, North Carolina, Spain, Texas, the UK and Washington D.C., as well as its EMEA HQ in Amsterdam, Netherlands and moved to a new, expanded corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

MyPOV

It’s only a matter of time and I’m predicting an impressive IPO showing. Rubrik is very squarely intending to take NetApp (and to a lesser extent, EMC) out of the storage equation and Wall Street knows the sort of revenue those companies generate. This is going to be an interesting one to watch.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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