After focusing on Salesforce data protection for several years, OwnBackup added support for two new SaaS applications in less than a year.
Protection is in beta for ServiceNow, which specializes in IT services, operations and business management. OwnBackup expects to launch the product to the general public in the spring.
The release follows the fourth quarter launch of OwnBackup data protection for Microsoft Dynamics 365, a cloud-based platform of business applications that includes CRM. In August, OwnBackup secured a $ 240 million round of Series E funding at a $ 3.35 billion valuation. Last January, it closed a $ 167.5 million Series D investment. Funding to OwnBackup has helped expand its SaaS data protection reach across new applications, as well as increasing employee and office numbers, according to CEO Sam Gutmann.
OwnBackup’s data protection capabilities include backup, recovery, security, compliance and sandbox seeding. As SaaS data protection is on the risethe Salesforce backup market has become competitive, with providers including Commvault’s Metallic, Druva and Veeam.
OwnBackup offered protection for ServiceNow workloads a few years ago but discontinued it at that time to focus on Salesforce.
OwnBackup, based in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, also made several acquisitions last year, including Nimmetry, a SaaS data management vendor. Nimmetry has been a technology partner of ServiceNow since 2017, and that acquisition helped OwnBackup build backup and recovery capabilities into its new product, Gutmann said.
The vendor claims about 4,400 customers. Gutmann said he hopes to reach 7,000 customers by the end of the year.
OwnBackup is constantly looking at other potential acquisitions, more SaaS platforms to protect and the possibility of going public. In this Q&A, Gutmann discusses SaaS data protection trends, how the pandemic has affected the company’s work and early details on ServiceNow support.
What are SaaS data protection customers most in need of?
Sam Gutmann
Sam Gutmann: Security is a big part of it, clearly with all these attacks in mind that are always in the news. It’s very important to provide the same level of protection to your SaaS applications that you’re used to having in -place applications. The ability to manage data, understand where it’s going and normalize it in your SaaS applications is the next big one where we’re going with the security product suite.
How has the pandemic affected the process of making acquisitions, securing funding rounds and developing new technology?
Gutmann: There are a lot of challenges. I used to travel to our offices in Israel seven or eight times a year and London five times a year. I haven’t been there in almost two years, alas.
It’s very important to provide the same level of protection to your SaaS applications that you’re used to having in -place applications.
Sam GutmannCEO, OwnBackup
From a pure business perspective, actually COVID, no matter how bad it is personally, [created] tailwind for business. In one weekend, companies realized they needed to speed up their digital transformation projects. At the same time, go home all and many of the processes, controls and security put in place [manage] those projects went up in smoke. You need to move faster, [but] you put an enormous amount of additional risk into the process.
What made you choose ServiceNow as the next platform for OwnBackup protection?
Gutmann: ServiceNow is one of the largest SaaS platforms, [holding] extremely critical data to their customers. They are focused on the enterprise midmarket – and there are many opportunities in our current customer base that also use the ServiceNow platform.
What are some details on the ServiceNow product?
Gutmann: It’s similar [to other OwnBackup products]. This is our primary recovery product for anything built into the ServiceNow ecosystem. This is the same use case with Salesforce and Dynamics.
It is a model of shared responsibility where ServiceNow is responsible for their platform and the customer is responsible for all the data they store on that platform. ServiceNow has done a lot. [CEO] Bill McDermott talks a lot about how it’s not just an IT platform-you can use ServiceNow for COVID vaccine tracking for your employees. They are pushing to expand their platform to become the primary business platform and record system for their customers. That data is becoming more critical, and we’re here to help protect it.
What is the reason you chose Dynamics as a primary application to protect?
Gutmann: The dynamics are really interesting. This is a huge market. Microsoft is so big, they don’t separate the revenue of Dynamics CRM. But if they do, it will probably be the second largest pure SaaS business on the planet, behind Salesforce. And there are billions of dollars worth of Microsoft legacy licenses on-premises that Microsoft’s sales team is in the process of helping customers convert to the cloud.
You have long been focused on Salesforce. How about moving to another major platform?
Gutmann: That’s good. We have some good customers. We’ve built a good relationship with some older people at Microsoft.
The focus on Salesforce from the beginning was my view on startups in general, which most startups fail because they don’t focus. We felt that in 2021 we had the right resources, capital, balance, and team size, that we could focus a new team within the Dynamics space, now the ServiceNow space, without disrupting our core team working in the Salesforce ecosystem that grows 100% in a year.
The product has been in development for a while and we did a lot of testing before we could get it into the hands of customers, and take a lot of lessons learned from our seven years in the Salesforce ecosystem. We designed that to be a platform, so it’s a massive reuse of the code base, and new applications will be easier and faster for us to deploy.
All SaaS applications are different. You mentioned reusing the code base, but how hard is it to start SaaS data protection for a completely new application, and what do you need to do from your end?
Gutmann: We need to understand the APIs of the next SaaS application for data release and above all metadata, so that we can understand the relationships between data. The other part is that we need to understand the business rules, so as you put data back in a rollback, you’re actually making a new record, so whatever triggers and workflows you may have will be appropriate. on that new note.
Are you actively looking at other platforms for protection?
Gutmann: We are. The average business now uses more than 300 SaaS applications, which is overwhelming. It may be a guy on his cell phone using Evernote, but that’s still company data. We’re constantly talking to our customers, seeing what the next critical workloads they want us to protect are, and we’ll start working on cloud number four soon.
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Sam Gutmann