I'm Simon Taylor, the CEO and founder of HYCU. HYCU stands for Hybrid Cloud Uptime, and we are now the world's fastest-growing data protection as a service company. We are incredibly excited to be here with you all again. Now I will tell you guys this — today is my 12-year-old son's birthday, Benjamin, and he was a little upset that I didn't show up for his birthday. I had to take him out last weekend. So if we could just give a round of applause for Benji to start off, I'd love to show that to him on TV later. Thank you very much, I appreciate that, I know he does as well. I'll save you all from that, but again thank you all for being here. Today we have a very exciting set of announcements. We're going to talk about what HYCU has been up to, but first I want to do a brief introduction to the players here from HYCU and from our new partner Dell. We've got myself, David Noy who is our executive sponsor at Dell, Sai Sundaram who runs product, Andy Fernandez who runs product marketing, Shiva Raja the director of product management, SAA head of cloud products, Don Jennings our senior director of global comms, and Brian Bell who recently joined HYCU to run the Dell partnership. This is a really exciting time for HYCU. I know some of you were at our headquarters about a year ago, and we had a great time talking about SaaS data protection and how cloud was changing and how the need to provide data protection to cloud and infrastructure was not enough. We talked about apps and databases. So I'll give you a quick refresher on who HYCU is, set the tone, and then we'll go into new announcements. Today we've got planned: an introduction to HYCU, freedom of choice in hybrid and multicloud, a very big announcement with a new partner, protecting applications from build to run, and protecting AI. I know you guys have had fun talking about networking with other vendors — we're here to talk about the importance of artificial intelligence when it comes to infrastructure, data protection, and technology. We hear a lot about apps and databases running AI, but what about cybersecurity and data protection? We'll cover that today, then summary and Q&A. HYCU — Hybrid Cloud Uptime, pronounced like the poem. We thought about a haiku as something that takes all the data in a language and boils it down to three simple lines. The vision for our business is to be the leading provider of simple, scalable, and secure multicloud SaaS data protection solutions. But SaaS in our case is a bit of a misnomer because we're really talking about applications as a service, database as a service — not just on-premises but also in the cloud and in SaaS. How do you provide one ring to rule them all? How do you provide a true data protection platform designed for the modern data estate? Our mission is to build a safer world through universal protection of data. The idea that you'd have 30 or 40 different data protection companies doesn't make sense to us. You need the big guys like Dell and somebody with end-to-end comprehensive coverage like HYCU. But what you don't need is a different backup company for every single app and every single database. Our entire theme today is about bringing all this together to protect customers better. This 'building a safer world' mission — I actually thought, will our own engineers accept this? Is it too high-minded? Does it sound like a sales pitch? The engineers looked at it and said, we feel proud to come to work every day because we see the problems we're solving. We've kept this as our mission because it's what our engineering team feels most passionate about, and that makes me very proud. Globally recognized and trusted — today HYCU has over 4,600 companies protected in 78 countries and over 450 channel partners. While we may not be the biggest brand, we are providing the most coverage to an enormous number of countries and companies around the globe. Industry-leading experience and analyst recognition — for a long time we talked about our 91 NPS score. We're super proud our customers like us, want to come back, and buy more. What's happened in the last one to two years is we became a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which was really exciting. Then Google named us Partner of the Year for Backup and Recovery. That was a really exciting moment because the market said, wait, this is Google's number one partner for data protection, we need to look at these guys. Then GigaOm named us a leader in the Cloud Data Protection Radar Report. HYCU is on a fast and furious journey, and we're trusted by some of the world's most important organizations — the United States federal government, the Department of Defense, and Fortune 500 companies. The trick to understanding what HYCU does is thinking about it in terms of coverage. When you think about data protection, you talk about sources and targets. Companies came out 30 or 40 years ago saying they'd be the best at backing up Unix, or Windows, or VMware. HYCU took a step back and said the world has truly changed. People don't keep their data in one source anymore — on-prem, public cloud, SaaS. The average mid-market company today keeps data in no less than 212 different sources. Just let that sink in. I mentioned my son Benji. He asked me what HYCU does. I said, on the iPhone you've got apps — what happens when you delete them by mistake? He says you go to iCloud backup and hit the button. I said that doesn't exist for companies. He said, why not, Dad? I said, that's what HYCU is here to fix. We're building a unilateral platform to protect data no matter where it resides. We think this is the challenge of the century when it comes to data. The aggregate of all data protection companies in the Gartner Magic Quadrant — they only protect less than 10 SaaS services. There are 30,000 SaaS services in the world, and they protect an aggregate of 10. HYCU now protects over 80. We protect your hybrid cloud infrastructure, your modern cloud apps and services — everything from BigQuery, Cloud SQL, to Jira, Confluence, Salesforce, and everything in between through one easy-to-use platform, either downloaded behind the firewall or used as a true SaaS service. That's why we've got 4,600 customers — we understood that data was going to end up in such an exponential number of sources that we need to protect as many as possible. Let me pause there. Any questions?
What a beautiful question, I could be here all day. We were founded in 2018. I sold my previous company to Citrix, which is right across the street. I remember walking over there with Mark Templeton and having great conversations with him and Al Monserrat back in the day. We announced the acquisition at Citrix Synergy, and I left the hall and was in one of the bars in Vegas when I bumped into Gor Viji, who is now our CTO and my co-founder. Gor and I talked about the world of data protection. He explained to me — I was not a data protection expert at the time — he said, 'Simon, the challenge is nobody has consumerized data protection. It's really difficult to use, takes a lot of time, a lot of professional services, it's just not simple.' I asked why, and he said the equivalency problem — it takes an equal amount of time to build each individual data source. So if you want to back up and recover VMware, it might take a year or 10 years to get it right. Then you add something like Google, one app, one database, it takes an equivalent level of time. I said, if we can solve the equivalency problem, we've really got something. This led us on a journey to building what we call HYCU rCloud, our platform. What we effectively did was gather seed funding and build a simple integration that allowed you to back up Nutanix first, then Google Cloud, then VMware, then Office 365. We up-leveled all the data under a single pane of glass through an abstraction layer and made it easy to migrate data between clouds. R stands for resiliency. COVID hit — we had a couple hundred customers and things were going really well. COVID hit and people realized HYCU was super easy to use. We grew 450% because people were using HYCU to migrate data from on-prem to the cloud and back again without having to go to the office, because it was so simple. After that we raised $140 million from Bain Capital and Acrew. Enrique Salem, who some of you may remember from Symantec days, joined us as chairman of our board. And that's how we grew over the last five to six years.
