Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the VM blog expert interview series. And today we have a familiar face back with us, my friend Simon Taylor, the founder and CEO of HYCU. Simon, as always, it's great to have you back on the show.
Dave, it's great to be here and it's great to see you, my friend, as well. Thank you so much for having me on.
Absolutely. So, if you would just kind of set the table for us and just give us a quick elevator pitch for HYCU to help refresh folks who may be watching this to better understand, you know, who the company is.
Of course. So, HYCU stands for hybrid cloud uptime, HYCU, and we are the world's fastest growing data protection as a service company. Now supporting over 86 integrations. That means you can back up and recover data from 86 different data sources across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS. We're the world's number one leader in SaaS data protection. In fact, a journey that we began in April of 2018. Today, we have 4,600 customers in 78 countries. And as Dave knows very well, we were signed to the Extended Technologies ETC price list at Dell in January, meaning that we can actually be bought off of the Dell price book in any country across the world.
Now, I know HYCU and the team have been on a worldwide tour of events. And it sounds like it's been another busy week for the team at Dell Technologies World. HYCU supporting Dell isn't really new in and of itself, but can you talk about what is new and what was recently announced?
Of course. I think one of the key tenets of HYCU compared to many other data protection vendors is we have always said we will never sell storage. That gives the customer true freedom of choice and complete control of their data set. About two years ago, we started talking to the data protection services team at Dell. They said, 'You guys support 86 different backup sources. We'd love to be able to back you up onto Data Domain.' So we added all on-prem targets and became Data Domain compatible, then joined the DD Boost ecosystem. Then we continued talking to Dell, and they said, 'You're now supporting cloud and SaaS data. It would be great if that could land on Data Domain as well.' So we spent the last year putting our platform on Data Domain Virtual Edition. Now customers can get the true value of Data Domain deduplication wherever they go, whether backing up on-prem, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, or SaaS. And the most important thing is it's not just cloud and on-prem, it's also SaaS. The SaaS market was completely underserved. Until HYCU, only five of the world's largest SaaS services were backed up. Now we back up 86, ten times more than anyone else. And we moved our whole platform onto DDVE. Now, whether it's Office 365, Salesforce, Okta, Entra ID, Atlassian, you can get the full Data Domain Virtual Edition experience even when backing up SaaS data. That's been a huge announcement for us. We're here at Dell Tech World with a massive booth, the Tower of Power, featuring all 86 integrations. It's a great opportunity for the HYCU-Dell relationship to expand.
That's great. I mean, this announcement with Dell, it really does sound like the latest innovation and the support that you're announcing is extremely significant.
Thank you, Dave. I think it is, and what's great is that we're meeting the mood of the market. We're seeing a lot of people move from VMware to Nutanix or other hypervisors, and also many staying on VMware. In the world of AI, the data lake is becoming more essential. Things like Google BigQuery are becoming massive datasets, and until HYCU they were completely unprotected. So now no matter what digital transformation or AI initiative you're running, you have a real solution for enterprise-grade data protection, and you can do it all through Dell, which is incredibly exciting for us.
Yeah. I mean, you guys announced it this week. You've been talking about it, showcasing it at the show. Can we unpack things a bit more? Talk specifically about what Dell customers are gaining by having HYCU to protect data on Dell PowerProtect Data Domain.
If you look at the last 30 years of technology, one of the biggest constants is Data Domain. People absolutely love it. Dell has continued to enhance it. But the challenge for many customers has been that Data Domain is not connected to their cloud world or SaaS world. As their data estate modernizes, they want to keep Data Domain in the mix. HYCU is that bridge. We're bridging the Data Domain relationship into the next generation of the modern data estate. We have 86 workloads walking over that bridge every day, enabling customers to get the true value of Data Domain regardless of where their data sits. It's about freedom to choose your storage target. The message is simple: if you love Data Domain and you're responsible for an enterprise IT department, you now have a foolproof way to provide end-to-end data protection across on-prem, public cloud, and SaaS, and keep Data Domain in the mix both on-prem and as DDVE.
