News today from cloud data management vendor Druva who is further delivering upon its market opportunity with a strategic acquisition of CloudRanger, a backup and disaster recovery vendor that focuses on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
CloudRanger may be a company that not many have heard of. Founded only a couple of years ago in Ireland, CloudRanger focuses on offering an enterprise-level backup and DR offering. Despite only being a young company, CloudRanger has gained, in its short life, 300 global customers with names such as Vanderbilt University, Rockwell Collins and NASCAR. The company claims to have seen 300% growth in only the last six months, a statistic which doesn’t say much given what one assumes is a very low base. It’s also a strange statistic given the acquisition announcement – fast-growing companies don’t sell out this early and one can only assume that CloudRanger while growing well, hadn’t been able to gain sufficient funding to go it alone.
Anyway, M&A issues aside, CloudRanger differentiates itself from the other vendors in the space with a triple proposition: agentless service, a broad service coverage, and consumption-based billing. While I’d suggest that for the enterprise, CloudRanger’s target market, true consumption-based pricing isn’t a major driver, it is fair to say that the breadth of CloudRanger’s coverage of the AWS product suite (EC2, EBS, RDS, and RedShift) is a strong value proposition for its customers.
For its part, Druva is driving to be the preeminent SaaS data management platform – its offerings cover data protection, data governance, and data intelligence. And while some might quibble about how much of that the competing vendors (Rubrik and Komprise, for example) may or may not provide, the fact is that this opportunity is sufficiently broad that there is no need to compete for the rats and mice at this stage – the opportunity is big enough for all-comers.
So, why CloudRanger?
And so, the question for Druva, is why CloudRanger, and why now? In response to this question, Druva suggests three value propositions that the combined offering will deliver: accelerated time to market, cloud competency and an existing partnership with AWS. Broadly, there is an existing customer base for CloudRanger that Druva can sell into, there is a strong product offering that already covers significant parts of the AWS product portfolio, CloudRanger (like Druva) is a pure-SaaS offering and this fits easily into Druva’s existing framework and architecture.
To those valid propositions, I would also add two more:
- I suspect this was an acquisition with a bargain-basement price tag and hence a natural-enough one to make
- In one hit, this allows Druva to cover their existing legacy customers and workloads, as well as the higher-growth AWS-native ones
This last point is the most important one since, as enterprises continue to migrate their business workloads to the cloud, the breadth of storage locations increases the complexity of managing the data. This makes all the different data-related needs far more complex. This idea of a single pane of glass around administration and policy management is an idea whose time has come. Jaspreet Singh, founder, and CEO, Druva explains this notion:
The acquisition of CloudRanger extends the reach of the Druva Cloud Platform… This is an important step in achieving our vision to provide a solution that addresses the challenges our customers face as part of the very real and necessary journey of moving to the cloud. With CloudRanger, we provide a holistic end-to-end solution that builds a bridge between traditional infrastructure, and the modern cloud that customers are seeking. Both CloudRanger and Druva employ a cloud-native architecture that allows us to immediately integrate and enhance what is already an industry-leading, unified platform for backup and disaster recovery for our customers.
MyPOV
The acquisition, while opportunistic, makes sense when one looks at the direction most enterprises are heading. Druva’s existing value proposition was strong but ran the risk of becoming less relevant in a world that seems intent on moving as quickly to the cloud as possible. While that perhaps overstates the velocity of this shift, the reality is that the puck is moving in the direction of the cloud generally, and AWS particularly. Druva’s acquisition positions itself firmly as a strong data management platform for traditional workloads, and now AWS-centric ones.
Great article