Welcome to Across the Tech Pond, the US European webcast and podcast covering the main technology conferences and events, hosted by David Marshall, Neil Hughes, and myself, Anthony Savas. We are all avid technology conference attendees visiting the conferences and events big and small around Europe and in the US. In this show, we have a very special guest. Over the years, we've attended events addressed by cloud and software as a service—that's SaaS—data protection vendor HYCU, including recently in New York where the company was a participant on the IT press tour, which was attended by journalists and analysts. HYCU's cloud technology is now a well-established solution that helps companies manage and protect their data across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud environments, and it is sold by cloud service providers, managed service providers, and system integrators. HYCU was quick to point out to companies that the software they were buying on demand from software providers through the cloud was not automatically and comprehensively protected and backed up by those providers, and some of them are big providers as well. So companies were leaving themselves open to both cyber criminals and potential data catastrophes through data loss. As more and more companies are going down the software as a service route, the market for SaaS protection is obviously expanding, which is obviously good news for companies like HYCU. Before we move forward though, let's introduce ourselves. David?
Hey everyone, it's good to be back on another episode of Across the Tech Pond. I'm David Marshall, I'm co-host of ATP and the owner and operator of VMBlog.com here in the US. I'm in the Austin, Texas area.
I'm Neil Hughes. I host a number of podcasts over on the Tech Talks Network, Tech Talks Daily being the most popular. I also write for CyberNews. I currently live in the UK, work from that side of the Tech Pond, but at the moment I'm in the US reporting on another event. Great to see you all again.
Yeah, that just proves we do actually travel and we're not just doing this in our spare bedrooms. So that's good. I'm Anthony Savas. I'm a contributor to IT Europa, which is a pan-European channel title for managed service providers, VARs, system integrators, and cloud service providers. I also write for IoT Now and also something called TechLed, which is a communications portal and it's quite new. As mentioned, we have a very special guest and they're the founder and chief executive of HYCU no less. Can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Simon Taylor and I'm the CEO and founder of HYCU. Anthony, it's a pleasure to be here today.
Great. Well, thanks for being here, Simon. First question from me, maybe an obvious one for some of the listeners who don't know HYCU that well. I know there's a lot do but let's get this out the way. Where does HYCU fit into the current cloud data management protection space? What exactly do you do?
Sure. So, HYCU stands for Hybrid Cloud Uptime. We were trying to think about a word that meant all the data in a language boiled down to a small elegant package. But the premise behind HYCU was very simple. How do you simplify the entire data protection space providing equivalent levels of backup and recovery support across on-premises, public cloud, and SaaS? And from the very get-go in April 2018 when we founded the company, that was always the premise. It was how do you make it really easy to back up and more importantly recover your data regardless of the source or the origin of that data. We saw companies that were using five, even ten different backup products, if you can believe it. And we said, there's got to be one ring to rule them all. There's got to be a Swiss Army knife of sorts in the data protection space. And that's what we set out to build. Today, we've got 4,600 customers in 78 countries and a 91 NPS score, one of the best in the industry. Very proud of the team that's been on this journey with us and very grateful to folks like yourselves who have been actively speaking with HYCU and my team for the last eight years.
David, I think you had the next question for Simon.
Yeah, sure do. Simon, David Marshall here. It's always a great pleasure to speak with you. I always enjoy our conversations.
So as has kind of been mentioned, the market for SaaS data protection is growing as we all know. Could you maybe explain to the audience what some of the drivers are for that, and why are companies like HYCU able to take advantage, and maybe even talk about what's special about HYCU's Arc in the market.
Sure. Let's just start at the top: software as a service. When we talk about SaaS there's a lot of misnomers. What is SaaS? What does it mean? The obvious ones come to mind—people think about Salesforce, Office 365, maybe they think about Workday. The truth is there are 30,000 SaaS services offered just in the United States alone. And every single one of those SaaS services has the same thing in common, which is what we call the shared responsibility model. Simply put, that means their job as a SaaS provider is to provide you the value of their service, but the data that you put into that service is yours to protect. This is something that a lot of people don't understand, don't think about, and certainly Dave, when you and I started talking about this four or five years ago, nobody was talking about it. We kept coming to market and basically saying, look, SaaS is the biggest obstacle to true data protection because out of all the world's 30,000 SaaS services at the time, only five of them were backed up at all. We went through the entire Gartner Magic Quadrant and added up in aggregate how many SaaS services all these supposed leaders are protecting, and it was only five. So we said, there's 30,000 SaaS services, five of them are protected. I wonder how many SaaS services the average company uses. We ran a survey. The answer was 212. So 30,000 SaaS services, 212 combinations of those 30,000 in any particular company, and only five with any level of Gartner enterprise protection. That's really what we set out to change. We woke up one morning and said, this is going to be a real problem because if people don't understand the need to protect SaaS, they're leaving themselves massively open to all sorts of different cyber attacks. We built a platform that supports 92 integrations and growing—12 times more than anyone else—and became the world leader in SaaS data protection. But the second part of your question goes beyond that. What's driving the understanding today? Four years ago nobody understood this was an issue. What's changed? The simple truth is the market has started to wake up to the risk. There's a number of examples. You look at the MGM casino disaster—$1.2 billion in vendor losses because they were locked out of their single sign-on provider. You look at Snowflake supply chain attacks. You look at even CrowdStrike, which yes was a patch management issue, but I'll tell you, my 75-year-old mother called me the day CrowdStrike went down and said, 'What's this CrowdStrike? I don't like them. What are you doing about them?' I said, 'Mom, they're fine. Don't worry. It'll be back up and running in a minute.' Well, I couldn't get on my flight. All of a sudden, this amorphous world of third-party SaaS has come to roost. The chickens have come to roost, and people are going, 'Oh wait, this does impact me. This is something I need to think about.' And there's HYCU sort of showing up and saying, we can run a graph scan and help you visualize all of the SaaS services you have, because guess what? You probably don't know what SaaS you have at this point. Once we help you discover where all of the SaaS is, we can tell you what's backed up and what's not. We have a marketplace you can pull up where you can automatically add data protection across your on-prem, your public cloud, and SaaS. We provide you with the most comprehensive level of complete protection you can get anywhere in the world today. That's a very bold claim, but the numbers just don't lie. We have 12 times more support for SaaS services than anyone else. On top of that, we've partnered with Anthropic and built a low-code development platform. So if you've got a SaaS vendor that we don't support, we can easily add that integration, or you can yourself. What we're starting to see is a company, HYCU, that came to the market maybe a little bit early on the SaaS and cloud side, but with a very clear vision that we were going to protect the world's SaaS. Fast forward five years later past COVID and all of a sudden people are going, 'Yeah, that really is a problem. Thank god we've got a vendor that can actually help us out with that.'
David, do you want to come back there?
Yeah. I just think, if you could just kind of dig in a little bit into the HYCU Arc. Talk about that a little bit.
Going back to what I was saying, Dave—and I know you know this—about the world of SaaS, you have 30,000 SaaS vendors in the world and we realized that it would take unlimited time, money, and resources to be able to back up and recover all of those. By the time you did, there'd be another 30,000 that have sprouted up. The question became, how can we ever build a platform that will keep pace with the needs of this incredibly evolving market? This is why the data protection vendors have predominantly ignored SaaS in the past. The TAMs on their own are too small to invest in. In aggregate, they're too complicated to build. So you just say it's not a problem and move on, focus on on-prem and cloud. We said we're not going to give up on this problem. We're not going to give up on the customer. Instead of shying away from it, we embrace the problem. If you don't have unlimited time, money, and resources to build something, what can you do? This goes back to an old mentor of mine who said to me, Simon, if you ever become a CEO, don't be the kind of CEO who thinks for 10,000 people. Be the CEO who lets 10,000 smart people think for them. It's an old axiom, but it's a good one. I remembered that and it stuck in my noggin. I was sitting there one day and I thought, what if we didn't have to build 30,000 SaaS integrations? What if we could get 30,000 SaaS vendors to build for us? That's when the light bulb went off. It was like, oh my god, that's our penicillin moment. You kind of leave a bologna sandwich out one day and you wake up the next day and you've got a magical medication that saves the world. That really was our watershed moment at HYCU because we thought, what if we were to build a low-code development platform and then make it really easy for SaaS vendors to write to us, so that we can democratize the world of data protection by building a marketplace that's built on our platform, only works on our platform, is secured by our platform, but in which the specifications of the individual SaaS sources could actually be driven into our model and then added as applications in an application store. We took a page out of the Salesforce handbook—instead of building every single feature for CRM, they opened up a marketplace and let third parties write to it, and it's been phenomenally successful. We've now got 92 of those integrations in our marketplace. Companies like iManage that are market leaders when it comes to the legal vertical—there was no way they were going to be able to convince a Gartner Magic Quadrant data protection vendor other than HYCU to go out and spend the time, money, or resources to protect them. But they knew they needed protection. They have an incredibly smart, forward-thinking CEO, Neil Araujo, and he reached out and said, hey Simon, I've heard about this whole Arc thing, we'd like to do it. His team used the Arc development platform. They built the integration. They own that IP. They own that integration. And it gets sold directly through HYCU. We have provided for the first time in the history of humanity a real platform for third-party SaaS vendors to build integrations and give their customers the enterprise-grade data protection they deserve. It's been a great ride. It's been a lot of fun and it's wonderful to see the SaaS vendors themselves' eyes open, kind of saying, I don't want to be a backup company, right? I don't want to go beg a backup company to build for us. I've got 500 million ARR, I've got thousands of customers, and they deserve enterprise-grade data protection. Oh, we'll just build on HYCU. For us, that was the real game-changing moment in our history.
Great. Thanks for that. Neil, you had a question.
Yeah, I mean Simon, I think we spoke at the beginning of January about SaaS data protection, and I didn't get to meet you at the IT press tour recently. But since our last conversation, obviously we're talking about Arc today. Is there anything you can expand on in terms of support that you're actually providing companies right now? And also an update on some of the alliances that HYCU has made with other vendors in the go-to-market ecosystem, because without revealing any spoilers, there's a pretty big one in there, isn't there?
Very true. Why don't we start with the partnership? HYCU announced a very exciting partnership with Dell Technologies earlier this year. We sit on the ETC price book—the Extended Technologies price book—which makes us the only data protection vendor to support on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS that's actually sold by Dell themselves. The reason Dell reached out to us and we started to build this great relationship is because of HYCU's bring-your-own-storage model. A lot of backup recovery vendors have kind of become quasi storage companies. They're selling their own box and they want to fill up that storage box. HYCU's always taken a bring-your-own-target approach, saying we don't want to own your data. We believe it's safer for your data to sit in your tenant, whether that's in your cloud, in your data room, wherever it might be. What we did with Dell is we built a Data Domain and DD Boost integration so that now you can buy HYCU and get all the value and power out of Data Domain, put those two things together for deduplication, and you have an incredible end-to-end solution. It's phenomenal because out of all the technologies—you guys have been around the block for many years—I won't say how many—but can you imagine a product that has been loved for as long as Data Domain has? This is a product that has just been in market for decades and people are still obsessed with it. The ability for us to go in now with Data Domain Virtual Edition and say to customers, guess what? You can now run Data Domain in the cloud. You can dedup Google, Azure, AWS—all of these modern SaaS workloads you're running, you can dedup those too. You can use Data Domain everywhere. People are finding more and new kinds of value from that Data Domain. And that's incredibly exciting. When you're talking about exploring the art of the possible there, we are at that magical time of year where we've got one eye on 2026. I'm curious what kind of feedback have you had from customers that are starting to re-explore this and what—
It's been incredible. Yeah, it's just been incredible. I mean hundreds and hundreds of some of the world's largest enterprises banging on the door saying this is what we need, this is what we've been waiting for. The other thing that I found incredible has been the feedback from the hyperscalers. Talking to folks at Google, at Azure, at AWS—not folks that I would necessarily have thought would have been this excited about the partnership—but they're like, you know what, we want to sell with Dell. We love Dell. Dell has got the world's biggest sales machine. We've never really been able to be a part of it. And HYCU operates as almost like a bridge between those areas. The response has been phenomenal. The customer appreciation has been just dynamic. I won't mention who, there's a major sports team in New England and I was talking to the CIO and he said, 'This is what I've been waiting for. I love Dell. I love these guys, but I've always needed that bridge between Data Domain and the hyperscalers, Data Domain and SaaS. Now I can kind of tie all this together with a bow and give myself that enterprise-grade data protection.' So that's been absolutely wonderful. And then your other question was about Arc and some of the response that we're seeing. There's so many of these new integrations. We launched Box this year. We launched Slack this year. We launched iManage this year. We've launched I think two dozen of these integrations just in the last six months. And it just doesn't slow down. It's been a lot of fun building the cross-company go-to-market motions because the wonderful thing is that once these SaaS vendors build on our platform, they really know they can trust that data protection. And so what they immediately do is say to their sellers, hey, when your customer asks how they can recover this data, point them to HYCU—that is the preference. So I think we've built this wonderful symbiotic relationship with the SaaS vendors, and I'm really excited to see how that continues to grow in 2026.
Next question from me, Simon. You've mentioned workloads and integrations, etc. So I think we're approaching about a hundred now in total. By the end of next year, approximately how many do you think we'll have in a year's time? And secondly, I imagine you're going for the low-hanging fruit, the big software packages that people want—Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.—some of the other ones you've mentioned. But obviously there are some niche ones. You mentioned the legal profession there. But how about other things like compliance, critical national infrastructure, and all these other areas which people haven't actually thought of—who, it's not software people are using in their bedrooms and offices, it's other stuff. What are you doing in that area, Simon?
One of the areas that I'm really keen on is HR and the people function, because if you think about where the core assets of a business are, it's in your CRM, it's in your ERP, it's in your HR modules, and it's in your finance SaaS apps. If you look at Workday, Bamboo HR, and some of these, you realize you've got an awful lot of data in there. You've got salary information, personally identifiable information, things that could really legally create compliance issues for a company. We've added Bamboo HR this year. We're working on Workday now. We're going to continue to explore the HR horizontal. The other thing that I'm really becoming interested in is compliant industries. I keep looking at legal and healthcare. Healthcare—this year I actually had a little procedure done and I was on the gurney being pushed down the hospital corridor, and I just saw the same vendor's name over and over and over again on every screen. It just suddenly occurred to me—my God, that's none of that's backed up, is it? And so literally right before they put me under, I'm thinking, we've got to back that up. The key is that we have the power to democratize data protection. We have the power to embolden SaaS vendors to lean into backup and recovery and say, you know what, I never wanted to be a backup vendor. I couldn't be bothered to do that, and why would I? That's not my core business. Thank god these guys are here, they'll go take care of that for me. Leaning into those powerful relationships is going to be part and parcel of what we do next year for sure.
Yeah. How about the government sector? Is that something you're active in any way or looking to make more hay in?
It's pretty surprising to me. It's amazing actually how successful we've been in the United States federal government. We've got an amazing team there led by Gary Cone. About a third of our business is actually US-fed, and it's incredible because they love the simplicity. If you think about governments, they typically have too few resources to do too many jobs—it's especially apparent in the government sector. The simplicity with which HYCU can solve a wide variety of their problems is just critical. We also have an incredible partnership with Craig Abod and Carahsoft. Craig's a great mentor of mine, a wonderful human being, and one of the most powerful distributors in the US federal sector. Outside of the US, there are other friendly nations that we do business with. I love this example—there is a navy in the world that was out there trying to figure out which data protection technology they should buy. They took three vendors—I won't say who, but we were one of them—and they loaded all three of us onto a ship. Luckily, I didn't have to go personally, but they loaded the bits up onto a ship. Without any IT person on board, they sent the ship out for six weeks and said, 'When you come back, captain, tell us which one you were able to back up and recover data with.' And by the time he got back six weeks later, he said, 'The only one we could get going was HYCU.' And that's how they went with us. To me, that is the ultimate case study in simplicity and a case study in what we really strive to do here in the business. It's to make things easier. It's to make sure we can support our customers, but ultimately to make sure that data protection is actually a good time. It's something people want to use, they can use. They don't need professional services to deploy it. They can just get it going, kind of set and forget and move on. We're really grateful for the customers that have tried us over the years, the customers we have today, and just thrilled about the future as well.
