Having interviewed numerous tech industry thought leaders for IT World Canada over the years, it’s rare to see a company in the triple threat position of having the right disruptive product, at the right time, with a seasoned executive leadership team redefining a $48 billion market.
Rubrik is expanding rapidly in Canada. Founded on the mission “to pioneer a fresh approach to an old problem,” Rubrik has made unprecedented milestones–from being the fastest-growing enterprise company in the billion-dollar league to earning the honour as the fastest time in Gartner history that a company has made it from founding into the Magic Quadrant.
To gain deeper insight into the disruptive innovation occurring in the data management market, I connected with Co-Founder & CEO, Bipul Sinha.
Brian: What market pain did you and your founding partners see that led you to start Rubrik?
Bipul: “The byproduct of new applications created with emerging tech like IoT, mobile, social, and cloud is data. Data is the new lifeblood of business – there are over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created daily. Until Rubrik, there was no simple solution to manage and protect all of this data born of the cloud era.
Prior to Rubrik, backup was grudgingly purchased, hoping it would never be used. Customers were underserved, and their only options were complex and brittle solutions offered by legacy vendors who’d made little innovation in 10-15 years. Everyone was struggling with the same massive challenge–the fragmentation of data and applications across data centre and cloud. That’s where Rubrik comes in–our cloud data management platform is designed to radically simplify how businesses manage data. It addresses the inability to scale, lack of cloud integration, and management complexity of legacy backup.”
Brian: I saw that John Chambers, Chairman Emeritus of Cisco, recently joined Rubrik as a Board Advisor – why did John join and what’s your relationship with him?
Bipul: “During John’s 25 years at Cisco, the key trait that helped him stay ahead of the competition was his ability to reimagine the company and spot market transitions long before others saw them coming. As you would expect, those market transitions are happening faster and more frequently than ever before.
The shift to cloud has been one of the most disruptive market transitions in tech. Rubrik helps enterprises navigate the shift to a hybrid cloud world and transform their data management operations from an insurance policy to a competitive advantage.
John has been a great mentor, and we are honoured to be able to tap into his years of experience leading one of the world’s largest technology companies as we continue our journey toward building an iconic tech company of our own.”
Brian: What do the recent awards and accolades mean to you at this stage of building Rubrik?
Bipul: “Awards and accolades are huge for our team here at Rubrik, but also for our customers, as they validate our approach and motivate our teams to keep innovating. In August, we were honoured to be named Best of Show at VMworld 2018 for a second year running, also winning Gold in the security category with our latest Rubrik Polaris SaaS application, Radar. We were also recently ranked #10 on LinkedIn’s Top Startups list and featured on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.”
Brian: Rubrik is known for being the fastest growing enterprise company in the billion-dollar league–what has led to your tremendous growth rate?
Bipul: “We’re redefining a $48 billion market in significant transition, and we’ve assembled a top team to go after this opportunity. Our team includes our partner ecosystem. We go to market 100% through the channel, and that has helped us quickly enter and gain traction with enterprise customers in nearly 40 countries.
We’re relentlessly focused on delivering an excellent product and maintaining a rapid pace of innovation. This year, we’ve announced four major product releases.
Rubrik’s API-first approach and strong technology partnerships with key industry players like Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, VMware, Nutanix, and Pure Storage, makes it easy for our customers to achieve their digital transformation and cloud objectives–and that drives adoption.
Fundamentally, I believe the driver of our success has been simplicity. We deliver a consumer experience to hardcore IT users.”
Brian: What are you most proud of when you speak with Rubrik’s customers?
Bipul: “At Rubrik, making our customers successful is our number one priority. It’s gratifying to hear customers share how Rubrik has given them peace of mind, strategic leverage from data, and time back in their day. Time to focus on examining new technologies, time with families or just time to sleep because they are no longer dealing with backups failing at 2am. Rubrik’s ability to automate tasks via our policy-driven ‘set it and forget it’ approach allows our customers to spend time on more exciting things like digital transformation, security or cloud technologies.”
Brian: Along that same line of thinking, what are you most proud of about the team at Rubrik?
Bipul: “I have so much to be proud of and thankful for. This year, Rubrik’s engineering team broke new ground with Rubrik Polaris, the first SaaS platform for data management applications. Rubrik Polaris provides a unified system of record and was built to tackle the challenge of data fragmentation that comes with implementing cloud-first and multi-cloud strategies. We’ve released two applications for the Rubrik Polaris platform to date. The first, Rubrik Polaris GPS, provides enterprises with a single interface for global visibility and control over all applications and data. The second, Radar, leverages machine learning to model threat behaviour, accelerating how enterprises detect and mitigate data security incidents like ransomware.”
I’m also incredibly proud of the positive contributions Rubrik employees make in the communities where they live and work outside of their day-to-day roles. Our corporate social responsibility program, Rubrik Beyond Work, allows employees to donate 1% of their time to giving back. That’s about 21 hours per employee per year. With 1,200 employees on staff, that’s over 25,200 volunteer hours each year. Given the company’s rapid expansion, you can expect that number to increase exponentially in the years ahead, including in Canada where we’re continuing to grow our team.”