Clumio CEO Rick Underwood: Backup remains company focus

Clumio CEO Rick Underwood simultaneously sees both hype and promise behind emerging technologies like generative AI for backup software, but aims to keep customer concerns as a top priority over feature creep.

Underwood, Clumio's second CEO since the company started in 2017, took over from co-founder Poojan Kumar. Kumar stepped away from the CEO position in June, but remains with the company as chairman of the executive board. Underwood previously served as chief revenue officer at Clumio and has worked at other technology companies, including BigPanda and Snowflake.

Clumio sells cloud data backup and recovery for AWS services, such as S3 object data and Elastic Compute Cloud instances, as well as Microsoft 365. Customer data is stored within Clumio's own AWS environment for recovery and to eliminate day-to-day management. The company claims to protect more than 100 customers and 100 petabytes of cloud data.

The company completed a Series D funding round in February, securing another $75 million in funding for a total of $261 million.

TechTarget Editorial spoke with Underwood about his direction for Clumio, features he considers important for the platform during the generative AI (GenAI) hype, and the blurring lines between backup and security.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What's your plan for leading Clumio through the rest of 2024?

Rick Underwood

Rick Underwood: Our focus is going to be on digital-native and data-intensive GenAI applications. We've seen a huge growth area both around helping people solve data management problems as well as data protection backup issues that they might be having.

We're seeing kind of the growth happening around S3 [and] DynamoDB, the entire infrastructure that sits around those data-intensive and digital-native applications. It's an opportunity to help people tackle challenges the existing on-premises players [must evolve] their architectures to meet.

We'll continue to offer all those [data protection] services, but looking at this space, [there's a] huge wave of data coming from GenAI that's cresting to a certain extent.

Many clouds like AWS are now offering native backup services. Why should customers consider a third-party, cloud-only data backup vendor?

Underwood: There isn't a lot of opportunity and there haven't been a lot of things that have been innovated in [public cloud backup offerings].

If you go with AWS Backup today, you're going to have full backup and snapshots. The challenge that customers face is that it's expensive to deliver the operational recovery that you might want [in AWS services], depending upon your application requirements and as you scale up.

What are some challenges facing Clumio?

Underwood: It's getting our word out and helping people understand who we are, what's available and that there's a new way of doing things.

The big innovation [for Clumio] is we're able to do incremental [backups with] very granular restore capabilities with high performance, [and] we deliver it as a service. So, you don't have to deploy infrastructure, you're not having to do a lot of those things that you get into on a day-to-day basis with [any other backup vendor].

[Clumio] is air-gapped by design, [but] you don't have to pay for the extra copies [or] manage those environments.

Backup vendors have leaned in to messaging around backups as a product for cyber resilience. Would Clumio make a security pivot?

Underwood: The fact that we're cloud-based offers an advantage [as] we're separate from their [cloud] account in an attack. [But] we see that as a very noisy space. There's a lot of other things that you can do around [security], but now you're in a me-too moment versus [discovering] where there's huge pain and problems [for backup customers].

We are part of the security story, whether we want to be or not, [but] everybody in the backup world is now [thinking about] how do [they] go beyond to the next set of use cases [in security].

Any plans to expand services to other cloud platforms?

Underwood: Right now, our focus is very much on AWS and helping those customers solve their problems and challenges. We have a great relationship with AWS, [and] they've been a fantastic partner to us.

Are we getting lots of phone calls and requests to look at [other clouds], whether it's Microsoft, Google or Alibaba? Absolutely. Is that someplace we will go? Absolutely. But we're going to go there when we're ready to make that move.

We're lumping everything into the same bucket, and there's things that are better served by classical machine learning capabilities versus GenAI.

Are there any plans for GenAI chatbots or related capabilities for the Clumio product?

Underwood: We're lumping everything into the same bucket, and there's things that are better served by classical machine learning capabilities versus GenAI.

[But] if you don't have a plan around it, as a company, you're going to miss the boat where things are going. Today, in the product itself, we are resolving 90% of the backup failures on our own [using AI and machine learning]. Then, 15 minutes later, we're giving [customers] a postmortem.

We are looking very deeply at GenAI and how that could help, whether that's automating a whole bunch of different tasks that people are doing within the product or within their daily backup environment.

[We could] enable a better search experience for data, but we don't want to be one of the me-toos and add a chatbot, call it a day and say we have GenAI in the product. There are bigger opportunities for how to apply GenAI in the space, both from a data management perspective and a backup perspective.

Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.