Druva: Data Resiliency at Scale

An Acceleration In Digital Transformation

Since launching in 2008, Druva has emerged as a leader in data resiliency, providing enterprise data protection services based entirely in the cloud. The company protects organizations such as NASA, DHL, Marriott, and Chipotle, facilitating 4 billion backups a year with 220+ PB of data under management.

As a venture-backed company, Druva has experienced a healthy adoption of its technologies over the last several years, building a customer list that includes thousands of companies across the globe and more than 60 of the Fortune 500. That adoption dramatically accelerated in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic hit and work went distributed seemingly overnight. SMB and the enterprise swiftly began moving their operations to the cloud and millions of employees began working remotely for an extended period. Amid the pandemic, Dell saw a similar acceleration in cloud adoption with its own customers and, along with that, a strong need for best-in-class cloud data protection services.

Making Connections

Gregg Adkin, a managing director at DTC, remembers being impressed when he first met Druva’s founders a decade ago. Setting out on their own after having spent several years at Veritas, Adkin recognized that Druva was “architecturally doing things we’ve never seen before.” DTC invested in the company’s Series C financing in 2013 and again in its 2014 Series D financing.

In 2020, as the world dramatically shifted to a more distributed working environment, Adkin and the DTC platform team helped connect the dots between Dell customers’ immediate data backup and protection needs and what Druva’s technologies offer. They quickly facilitated several introductions between Druva and the leadership of key Dell business units.

For enterprise startups, getting a foot in the door for sales or partnership deals at a F500 company can be a challenge. According to Robert Brower, Druva’s SVP of Worldwide Partners and Alliances, as an earlier-stage company it’s a matter of finding the right decision maker at a scaled company, hoping they’ve heard of you, and that they’ll take a call.

“If you’ve ever had to make those calls you know that the first 30 seconds of conversation can be life or death. And that’s only if someone picks up the phone,” says Brower. “But, because of the relationships that Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh has with Adkin and the DTC team, we were able to pick up the phone and have a meaningful, informed conversation with the Dell team about an OEM program that would immediately benefit both Druva and Dell customers.”

Partnering For A Win-Win

Those initial conversations between Dell and Druva proved to be fruitful. In April 2021, they together launched the product now known as APEX Backup Services powered by Druva Cloud Architecture, a comprehensive solution that delivers cloud data protection, cyber resiliency, data governance, and data intelligence for workloads in widely used SaaS applications such as Microsoft Corp.’s Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce.com, and for endpoints and hybrid workloads.

Following the successful launch, in January of 2022 Dell Technologies further integrated the joint solution into their APEX portfolio with the Accelerated Ransomware Recovery feature. The solution continues to be powered by the simplicity, security and reliability of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud and now includes further enhancements bringing customers leading ransomware detection, protection, and recovery technologies.

Adkin says that two areas where DTC strives to be additive to its portfolio companies are in helping to hone product market fit and with introductions to potential Fortune 1000 customers. This happens both within Dell business units and through the team’s greater network. Brower agrees that DTC has a solid community to tap into and noted that DTC’s approach to working with Druva has illustrated both the team’s desire to help and their impeccable timing to engage meaningfully.

“DTC was wise enough to have the vision to invest, but they’re also smart enough to know when to be hands off and when to lean in, like what they did with our Dell OEM partnership,” added Brower. “When the time was right, they facilitated connections and helped us move forward in a way that was good for both parties. It felt targeted. It felt measured. And it’s been an incredibly productive partnership.”