All of the sudden, Backup is the hot item. With Rubrik and Cohesity disrupting the backup space while the traditional vendors i.e. Veritas have been struggling, a lot of things are happening. In addition to AWS making a big push, you have Pure picking up StorReduce for their cloud backup platform. Veeam announced $500 million in a new raise, and several new startups like Clumio are looking to make their mark on the space.

Backup has historically been an expensive and complicated piece of the data center puzzle. Now the story has been shifting towards cloud and more of a data lifecycle management story. The storage vendors are looking to leverage their native technologies while independent players are looking to cast a broader net across technology stacks.

The bigger question for me is what happens to AWS’s ecosystem. They have traditionally shown little concern for eating their own children. It is a hard place to be, building product that rely on AWS and operate in its shadow. It is impossible to avoid AWS these days, but trying to effectively monetize the platform is increasingly challenging.