How Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh grew Druva to $304.3M revenue and 6K customers in 2024.

great to see you good to be here thank you joe i appreciate you taking some time and tim great to see you as well thank you for your time likewise joe happy to be here i have questions for both of you but just breathe i think i'll start with you um you know the cloud data protection market on the one hand it's quite crowded and listen i'm a blogger i'm not a deeply technical guy so sometimes i'm not clear on what makes one company or one technology unique compared to another so what does make druva unique what makes you stand out from the crowd in this market absolutely so there's a lot of cloud washing right now in the market everybody wants to be you know the best friend of the cloud providers but uh think about we don't think of cloud as just a technology or an integration it's more a business model shift uh where the customer is paying for a sla right a durability reliability sla and a fixed price point across the blue and that can truly be delivered building a you know truly a sas platform um which could you know really take you off the science project and really get the benefits of cloud and and not worry about application durability reliability performance of your of your enterprise we just become really really important in this pandemic if you notice suddenly in covert 19 the all the discussions about private cloud and hybrid cloud are all gone people truly want the public cloud experience and truly want the benefits of cloud right which is what we we stand behind so we're the only player in the market at scale which really sells the sas platform or data protection almost everybody else has a hardware strategy co-located hosted with some somebody else or just starting really starting the grounds up got it okay now as i cover the company you really emphasize momentum within the fortune 500. so two-part question have you penetrated the fortune 500 and then part two are you coming down market into more more of the small and mid-sized enterprise and if so how are you going to do that i think a predominant focus has been uh the mid market right uh the the 500 to 5k sort of a segment is a predominant focus we do uh sell up market and do a really good job going up market uh we have 50 of fortune 500 as customers now um and in three or fortune 15. um i think the the the digital transformation the cloud transformation is predominantly heavy in mid-market and it's a high velocity sort of a repeatable business model for us to follow uh there is a huge demand in up market which we often get pulled into and and resolve and go up but as i said a predominant motion is a mid-market motion um how do we go to market in red market our number one sort of go-to-market route is is our channel partners uh which we 100 channel company when it comes to you know uh go to market route and uh and specifically for the mid market we we that's a that's a predominant route to got market just to kind of add a little more for your your audience too i think yeah absolutely the channel side and when you think about what these these partners both kind of the regional boutiques as well as the mega multinationals are all uh working with our customers on is that digital transformation that journey to the cloud and particularly over the past three or four months with the reality of this situation of work from home and other things that is accelerating dramatically for our customers and our partners are helping us access those mid-market smbs as well as you know partners are bringing us into new fortune 100s that we had a an opportunity there just brought to us this week so that's that's a you know the route to market is just reset is purely channel and we're seeing a great movement led by our partners to help their customers with that digital transformation in their cloud journey got it so so tim a follow-up question for you then on the partner strategy uh these partners that are working with you is it mainly like a reseller model where they resell it into the customer and then the partner steps away or is it more of a managed services model where there's a recurring revenue opportunity for the partner or is it a mix i mean do you have any type of feel for what type of mix you're seeing out there on your partner base yeah i mean so i think interestingly you know because we're a sas company everything is about recurring revenues or in the case of a partner recurring margins and growth and adding on incremental services we happen to be one of the first major i.t you know corporate i.t workloads that a customer will adopt and so we're seeing our partners use us as that landing spot that point of entry for cloud and then building on incremental cloud services or professional services on top of that our ecosystem of partners ranges right so there are traditional var resellers for sure who they are reselling us like they would anything else and then moving on to the next where druva is handling that that sas management then we also have managed service providers right our outsourcers that are managing the druva platform and that data protection landscape for that customer so it varies but i think one of the exciting things for for partners and why we're seeing a dramatic increase of demand from partners wanting to work with us is because it's super relevant in the zeitgeist of the day it has a ton of opportunity to help customers transform which is what all partners are trying ultimately to help their customers do and then the economics of it the financial profitability the reoccurring margins the the net retention expansion um on the economic side which matters to partners too um is is extremely um lucrative got it great so a follow-up question for for both of you um from the technology side first in terms of how you've architected the platform and then second how partners uh can leverage that i believe correct me from wrong you're built on aws does that mean you're still multi-cloud um can partners basically protect sas applications that are running on multiple clouds but they're doing it through through something that's built on top of aws is that how it works pretty much so we wanted to take the complexity away of from data protection you know you have to think about a backup software a backup target a storage management tiering management and you know there's seven to eight different sort of uh components move all the moving parts to simplify it we've built a sas platform on top of aws but uh we have the best cloud coverage of all data prediction partners so we cover sas applications uh like office 65 uh sfdc you know google we also have the best coverage for cloud native platforms like ec2 rds dynamodb and also the hosted applications on public cloud like oracle sql microsoft applications right so we build the best coverage for all these uh you know transformative uh applications people are leading within the cloud so so it's it's a great opportunity for a partner community to sort of lead the discussion saying you know as the customers re-architect their data for the application footprint or digitalize themselves you know data protection security are foundational to how they played in the cloud and we have the best coverage to make sure they are safe and protected and and enabled without the complexity of understanding how to do it all in the cloud got it okay and then shifting that technology conversation over to tim and the msps and the partners um can you tell me a little bit about as i've covered the company you guys have said your purpose built for msps a lot of sas companies overlook that opportunity does this mean you basically have a multi-tenant uh approach so that the msps can manage all their customers seamlessly what is the approach and how did you spot the opportunity from day one sure so i think i'll loop in one part of the last question then ties into this too but you know on the ews platform um you know there are a number of traditional partners that are looking to figure out how they start to work in the aws ecosphere right and we're a fantastic opportunity for them to do that in a classic it workload and then blossom out into other things like ai and ml then there are the born in the cloud aws consulting partners who were born in the time of you know cloud proliferation and helping customers migrate and innovate were equally you know interesting to them because it is another aws centric workload and the services they can build around that that also leads us into the the msp front yeah i think you know um there's a number of ways that i think drew has been innovative um from the spotting the opportunity like just brief did and as a founder and then on some of the go to market motions as well we're seeing so many customers particularly the ones that we service most frequently which are the midsize and lower enterprise wanting to focus on their core business which is not necessarily running i.t it is manufacturing things as providing services or quality of experience to their customers and so being able to outsource and have a service provider manage the gamut of i.t whether that's network storage and obviously in our case the data protection and governance and compliance is really where we saw the opportunity to differentiate and bring that as another leg to either a reseller who's trying to build a secondary services a managed services offering or the pure plays as well and provide that dashboard has you know a multi-tenancy single pane of glass uh with ap a rich set of apis to allow them to do what they need to do on behalf of the customer and make it a ease of doing business with us as a as a sas vendor got it okay so i want to do a time check uh for those of you i don't know uh for our viewers and attendees...