With the launch of startup Clumio, technology guru Poojan Kumar is looking to disrupt the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) backup market through a new solution built from scratch by an all-star team of engineers hailing from VMware and Nutanix to reduce cloud complexity in the enterprise.

“From a complexity perspective, things get worse as enterprise customers move into a world of multi-cloud with Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS and VMware Cloud — that was the reason why we started Clumio,” said Kumar, former CEO and co-founder of PernixData and creator of Oracle Exadata, in an interview with CRN. “We fundamentally believe that backup fits the proven model for SaaS.”

Launching out of stealth on Tuesday after two years of development, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup is backed by $51 million in investor funding, aiming to take the U.S. market by storm. Read the full news story on CRN.

Analyst Take:  I find this to be such an interesting space, because when you immediately think of cloud backup, you probably think of what feels like a dozen different SaaS based services, but upon further review, you will be reminded that they are lightweight consumer backup products that on their best day could offer a simple SaaS backup for a small business. When it comes to enterprise, it’s a different story. 

Essentially, Clumio sees itself as an iteration of those simple cloud based backups, but with some thoughtful engineering that looks at what enterprise IT environments look like; often more of a hybrid, turned multi-cloud environment with data dispersed widely and not always easy to manage and equally as difficult to protect. 

The approach that Clumio is taking, to handle backups for on-premises and multiple public clouds, leveraging public cloud, provides a refreshing take on a problem that hasn’t had solutions evolve at the same rate as the rest of enterprise IT. 

In the briefing that I partook in, I was pleasantly surprised by what the company was doing, and it is clear that some pretty highly regarded individuals and VC’s (Note above) see confidence in the concept as well as its near term prospects. (Also note the CEO has had past successful exits) 

I could easily see Clumio making a run at going public or perhaps even more likely winding up in the sights of a company like Cisco or HPE, which have both been steadily adding to their data and analytics capabilities over the past several years.

For Clumio, the additional funds raised are going to be important moving forward. I believe it is time for the product to expand its legs into more deployments to show its value in the enterprise. It is great that the concept has led to funding, but solution companies like Clumio don’t get to be Uber and lose money for years. Investors will want to see a return, an exit, an IPO or some combination thereof. 

Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.

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