Druva Cloud Data Protection Service Gains Momentum -

It’s been a big year for Druva. The cloud services provider has notched 500 percent growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for its data protection service. That follows nine consecutive quarters of double-digit company growth, a trend which has continued into the current quarter, the company said.

No doubt, Druva competes in a crowded market -- and could be on a collision course with several fast-growth companies. Among the examples:

Thousands of CSPs run Veeam for their data protection services -- and Veeam is marching up into the enterprise via relationships with Cisco Systems, HPE, IBM and more.

In the SMB sector, thousands of MSPs plug into Datto's cloud for business continuity services.

Plus, a lengthy list of established giants -- Commvault, Dell EMC, NetApp, Veritas -- continues to chug along.

And another upstart, Rubrik, has been turning heads.

Nevertheless, Druva continues to gain momentum. The company has investing heavily in its Data Management as a Services (DMaaS) solution, putting money toward product innovation, channel expansion, and federal sales division growth to help solidify its position. The company launched its Druva Cloud Platform in August to provide data management services across endpoint, server, and cloud application data from a single screen. Everything is built around a pure as-a-Service model, eliminating the need for expanding dedicated hardware and storage infrastructure.

“The acceleration of data growth and continued storage fragmentation, combined with surmounting pressures from malicious threats, loss, and corruption, and increasing regulatory requirements has raised stewardship complexity beyond reasonable cost and manageability. With this as a backdrop, global enterprises need a fresh approach to simplify the modern enterprise data strategy,” Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and CEO of Druva, said in a release at the time.

Features, Functions and Partnerships

A month later, the company added Microsoft Hyper-V support to its cloud backup and archival solution Druva Phoenix. This added Hyper-V to Druva’s lineup of virtual machine environments, which included VMware, vSphere, and Nutanix.

More recently, the company unveiled Druva Apollo through its Druva Cloud Platform. The solution takes data management for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud workloads and runs them through a single control pane. This added integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the company’s data management suite, which includes physical and virtual server environments, endpoints, and cloud SaaS services like Office 365.

Throughout the year, Druva has been lining up a number of strategic partnerships. Among the more recent relationships:

Phoenix Software, one of the largest Office 365 providers in the United Kingdom.

Carahsoft Technology Corp, a key partner i the public sector

Another government boost arrived in November, when Druva's inSync solution earned Authority To Operate (ATO) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring of cloud products and services. With the FedRAMP-authorized Software as a Service distinction, organizations can now use Druva’s DMaaS solution in the public cloud.

Funding Boost

Venture capitalists are taking notice. Druva in August 2017 raised $80 million in growth equity funding in a round led by Riverwood Capital. Companies like Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, and Tenaya Capital were also in on the fun. That round brought Druva’s total raised funding to almost $200 million.

The company is putting the money towards accelerating R&D and expanding its global go-to-market efforts. The company's client list has grown to include AIG, ANDRITZ, General Electric, Hulu, Intuit, Marriott, PwC, ServiceNow and more.

What's driving demand? The usual trigger points: Ransomware attacks, ever-increasing amounts of data, and pressure on enterprises to modernize legacy IT architectures by moving to the cloud.

Reality Check

Overall, it sounds like Druva has serious momentum. Still, it's tricky to truly pinpoint the health of privately held firms. Even as Druva crows about business growth rates, the company doesn't disclose its actual revenues or profits (which may actually be quarterly losses).

For now, the focus remains growth. We'll let you know if or when the conversation potentially shifts to IPO.