Data Protection at Dreamforce 2018

Dreamforce 2018 finished last September 28 and it confirms once again the impact of the Salesforce, #1 CRM, on all industries.

San Francisco, CA has received the visit of 100,000+ people during that week thanks to this impressive conference. And we’ll see soon similar crowd for Oracle OpenWorld.

Being more and more at the heart of enterprises, one of the emerging needs for Salesforce is fed by the data management challenge and especially data protection and more recently with the GDPR requirement. But Salesforce has some real limitations in that aspect having recommend third-parties solutions, good for them and for the partner ecosystem.

Among the data protection theme i.e backup, archive, replication, copy data management and GDPR, the list of players is long: Acronis, Asigra, Capstorm, Ceptes, CloudAlly, CloudHQ, Datto Backupify, DBSync, Druva, Efolder (included Axcient), Odaseva, OwnBackup, Reflection Enterprise, Sesame Software, Spanning (now Kaseya), SpinBackup, Veritas and Workbox. At Dreamforce, only Ceptes, DBsync, Odaseva and OwnBackup had a presence. The first two as simple exhibitors, the third as silver sponsor and the latter as platinum sponsor, illustrating their implication for the last two in the Salesforce ecosystem. We understand why Spanning did not exhibit with the pending acquisition, now confirmed, by Kaseya.

(1) Exhibits at Dreamforce 2018 – (2) Listed on Salesforce AppExchange

Ceptes Software, founded in 2010, has promoted its archiving product DataArchiva with a different approach based on BigObjects service from Salesforce, different from several others such Odaseva or OwnBackup who prefer online scalable database on AWS or even MongoDB potentially.

DBSync, founded in 2009, has presented its replication approach to protect Salesforce data.

Odaseva, founded in 2012, is dedicated to Salesforce and provides an advanced comprehensive approach thanks to the expertise of its founder Sovan Bin. Odaseva did 11 sessions during the show.

OwnBackup, also launched in 2012, did 8 sessions and managed a small theatre on their booth, they also did two announcements during the conference related to archive with its Archiver product and blockchain with ICE. Archiver should be available in 1Q19.

These three players – DBSync, Odaseva and OwnBackup – suffer from the lack of support of other enterprise SaaS applications limiting their adoption by large enterprises. All these three have to react and suggest in 2019 extensions to adjacent applications (Office 365, G Suite, Box, Netsuite, Workday, etc.) as other players, listed in the table above, already supporting other SaaS or will add Salesforce soon.

Back to OwnBackup, the company received a Series C in April 2018 and we noticed that Salesforce Ventures participates to this $15.5 million round. Does it mean something? At least Salesforce recognizes the technology, the team and the need of such approach. We’ll see if something else will happen but Salesforce has to offer something especially with the aggressive growth they plan for the next decade with adjacent segments.

Insight Venture Partners (IVP) is also an investor and has participated in the last two rounds. Its portfolio is interesting with Acronis, N2W Software (acquired by Veeam early 2018), OwnBackup of course, Spanning (acquired by Kaseya a few days ago, also an IVP company), Unitrends (acquired by Kaseya as well in May 2018) and finally Veeam. They also had some capital in Quest before Dell acquisition and Syncsort at the time of BackupXpress. So currently IVP has four data protection companies coming from seven: Acronis, Kaseya, OwnBackup and Veeam. And we anticipate other consolidation steps. Veeam is already a giant and the three others have their respective flavors and characteristics. We’ll see but clearly something is happening at IVP.

Sesame Software, founded in 1988, was also at the conference presenting its backup solution in production since 2004, illustrating a real experience.

Data protection for Salesforce is not a market not even a segment even with all these players, some are dedicated, but more a niche. We anticipate some consolidations as we saw a few years ago with de-dupe or VM backup that’s finally became a feature especially for product leaders. This is already demonstrated by IVP and Kaseya detailed above. Therefore we think some players such Dell EMC, Micro Focus, now owner of HPE Data Protector for one year, IBM, of course Veeam and Veritas but also Acronis, Atempo, Barracuda Networks, Carbonite and Commvault have to make a move and decide to enrich their own solution.