NEW ORLEANS – There is a new data backup and recovery vendor in the marketplace. The only thing is they are not so new. HYCU, Inc., based in Boston, has been in business for more than 25-years under another name (Comtrade).
But in a sense HYCU is new – as a forerunner – for its focus on data backup, recovery and monitoring specific for hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI); namely Nutanix.
Unlike a new company or startup, HYCU has 350 employees that includes a bench of engineers. CEO Simon Taylor told EChannelNews that he still gets plenty of surprise looks from customers and channel partners when he informs them of the company’s history.
“This company started out as a few guys who left HP and became top outsource engineers. From there they hired more engineers, mostly in Europe, to be an outsource shop. After a few decades they thought it was crazy to have hundreds of engineers and no IP of their own,” Taylor said.
This led to the creation of HYCU. And, under five years the company has attracted more than 2,000 customers all through the channel. In between all that, the company spun off its monitoring tools business for Citrix to Citrix. Then inked a long-term product development and support contract with Citrix.
This deal suddenly made HYCU cash rich, Taylor said. It also enabled the company to develop monitoring and data protection solutions for the next generation. One of the company’s targets was Nutanix because they saw the hyper-converged market emerging. From there, HYCU created a purpose-built solution for Nutanix as other products in the market were mostly retrofitted for HCI,” he said.
“I believe Nutanix is the next VMware,” Taylor said.
The HYCU solution does all the configuration for customers and has the ability to backup and recover data in an on-demand fashion. It also is positioned to take advantage of up-and-coming cloud platforms.
The message for the channel from HYCU is to work on gaining acceptance for the product. Taylor and his team is positioning HYCU monitoring, data protection and recovery tools as a compliment. For the channel, Taylor believes solution providers will be able to sell more storage nodes increasing its profit margins in deals.
With Nutanix you get snapshot replication, deduplication, cloning and at least 40 per cent of those types of customers are looking at HCI instead of building a platform for hyper-converged. HYCU rounds out this type of solution, while providing total control, apps focus, catalogues, instant recovery along with self-service recovery of apps, Taylor added.
“This looks and feels like Prism and can be deployed in four minutes.”
Currently, HYCU has more than 100 channel partners in its network. The strategy going forward is to invest in those partners to solidify those relationships. In that mix, HYCU has national partners such as CDW and SHI, but other strategic partners such as Toronto’s Zycom are important because they are “laser focused on Nutanix.”
Taylor said that the company hired Junelle Swan, as its new vice president of channel. She was Citrix’ channel partner chief.
Adding to the Swan appointment, HYCU forged an alliance partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corp., where Carahsoft will distribute HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix backup and recovery software to partners selling into the Public Sector.
