Tech of VMworld 2017: Data Protection

While previous years have seen VMworld dominated by storage vendors, this year there was a strong presence from data protection aka backup and recovery vendors.

Rubrik spent up big on the marketing, hosting MVP and 2017 NBA Champion Kevin Durant of the Golden State Warriors at the booth on Tuesday, and hosting a party with a performance by Ice Cube that was said to be the party to attend. Rubrik were definitely the cool kids at this VMworld, picking up a VMworld Gold Award for Data Protection for their trouble. Amazing what you can do with a $180 million Series D, isn't it?

Rubrik is now an Advanced Tier Technology Partner with AWS and has been working hard to extend its client compatibility with enterprise applications like Oracle and SQLServer, as well as managing to get itself onto the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Veeam was seemingly everywhere, sponsoring anything that might conceivably find itself in front of an attendee's eyeballs at some point. The company continues its march into the enterprise market under new leadership in CEO Peter McKay, though there was a dearth of product announcements at the show. Veeam booked out Hakkasan nightclub for one of its legendary parties, and while I popped in for a quick 20-minute look around, I go to VMworld for conversations, and a dance party in a nightclub isn't conducive to that sort of thing.

Druva was also determined to make a splash, fresh off an $80 million raise bringing total investment up to $200 million. Known best for its endpoint protection products, Druva has now decided to go after a bigger slice of the huge data protection and secondary data storage pie. Already boasting 4,000-plus enterprise customers, Druva is betting on a Software-as-a-Service approach rather than on-site appliances.

It's clear that things are really heating up in this market now that the primary storage market has slowed down and the long awaited crunch has arrived.

Rubrik arch-rival Cohesity was also keen to be seen and has really stepped up its marketing efforts since hiring Rawlinson Rivera from VMware to be its Global Field CTO. Cohesity was talking up its Cohesity DataProtect for VMware Cloud Foundation, which replicates data from one set of Cohesity secondary storage to another, be it on-site or in the cloud. The idea of multisite, multi-cloud is now pervasive across vendors, so it's no longer a pipe dream.

Commvault was also at the show but didn't make any major announcements, no doubt saving them for its own show later in the year. Commvault has been slowly rebuilding after some rocky years saw its stock drop to under $32 in 2016 from a high of over $88 in 2013. Steady progress has seen the stock climb back up to over $60 at time of writing, so investors appear to have confidence in the overall vision for Commvault into the future, despite the increase in competition. The secondary data market is growing strongly so if Commvault can continue to carve out a strong position for itself amongst the new entrants, its heritage and breadth of offering may serve it well.

I spoke to mid-market player Carbonite (who call the likes of pSeries and SPARC Exotic Systems which is an excellent term that I am totally going to steal) about their approach, which is to try to provide a good option for the chronically under-served mid-market.

“The mid-market faces a confluence of constraints,” says Lilac Schoenbeck, Senior Director of Portfolio Marketing at Carbonite. “Mid-market companies are constrained in ways that others are not.” Small companies can easily move everything to the cloud, and large companies have more resources and can afford specialists. Carbonite takes a cloud-extended approach, leasing local hardware as an on-site cache for data that is also stored in the cloud. It's similar to the Rubrik and Cohesity approach, but without the enterprise price tag.

SMB focused Nakivo is one to keep an eye on. As Veeam moves up market, Nakivo seems to be sneaking in and stealing share in Veeam's original SMB market. Nakivo CEO and Co-Founder Bruce Talley told me that Nakivo is winning as many as 85% of deals against Veeam, and, similar to Veeam, is self-funded, cashflow positive, and profitable.

Nakivo is firmly aimed at the SMB with software that installs on NAS systems like QNAP and Synology that are popular with small business. Nakivo has a strong presence in EMEA and is looking to grow into the US market, so other players like Veeam and Carbonite had best keep their wits about them.

I attended VMworld 2017 on a press pass. I covered my own travel, accommodation, and expenses.

[Correction: The CEO of Nakivo is Bruce Talley, not Billson. I regret the error.]

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.