Expanding Their Alliance, NetApp Adds Rubrik to Price List

Rubrik’s cloud data protection and management offerings will appear on the NetApp price list starting next month. NetApp and Rubrik agreed to the co-selling agreement, announced Thursday, expanding on an existing partnership between the two companies.

NetApp has emerged as one of Rubrik’s most significant partners overall and is its closest among storage vendors. Rubrik also has relationships with storage providers Pure Storage, Nutanix, Cloudian and others. But NetApp is Rubrik’s most strategic storage partner.

Rubrik’s Wendy Bahr

“There are a handful of storage companies with whom we have some sort of technical integration, but nothing to the depth that we have with NetApp today,” said Wendy Bahr, Rubrik’s chief commercial officer. Bahr, a Cisco veteran and its channel chief before joining Rubrik in 2018, discussed the NetApp partnership with Channel Futures.

As chief commercial officer, Bahr has focused on expanding Rubrik’s cloud data management and protection platform with strategic partners. Bahr has championed Rubrik’s partnership with NetApp. In 2019, the companies agreed to co-develop Rubrik Cloud Data Management for NetApp StorageGRID. They integrated NetApp’s ONTAP software with Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management, to enable policy-based automation and flexible data management and recovery.

To provide continuous data availability and improved protection of enterprise applications, the companies integrated NetApp’s SnapDiff API with Rubrik’s platform. NetApp describes the latest version of SnapDiff v3, as an architecture for backing up NAS data to on-premises and cloud object storage. According to Rubrik, the combined solution also provides file-level search against massive quantities of unstructured data stored in NetApp’s software-defined object storage.

Strategic Co-Selling Initiative

Bahr said having Rubrik on the NetApp price list makes it easier for partners to sell and customers to purchase. NetApp is one of only a few major co-sell agreements Rubrik has formed to date, Bahr said. Rubrik’s largest co-sell partner is Microsoft, which lets partners bundle Azure cloud services with its data management products. Rubrik is also in the AWS Marketplace.

Among Rubrik’s channel partners, roughly 70% also sell and manage NetApp storage, according to Bahr.

“We’ve found that many of our mutual partners have a very, very strong foundation in building out NetApp practices and NetApp solutions,” Bahr said. “And that’s why we find this complimentary innovation so beneficial for our partners.”

Bahr said she believes it will make it more appealing for NetApp partners to offer Rubrik to their customers. And for Rubrik’s partners that don’t offer NetApp, Bahr sees it opening opportunities as well.

In a precursor to expanding their partnership, the two companies last month held the Rubrik & NetApp Data Protection Summit. In the opening session. Rubrik CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha, and NetApp CEO George Kurian described the partnership as complementary.

“Rubrik is complementing NetApp’s vision by delivering data recovery, compliance [and] security, to really deliver business transformation solutions,” Sinha said.

NetApp’s Kurian added: “There’s really good synergy and alignment between our go-to-market teams so that the entire customer experience – all the way from the business problem we’re solving to the back-end services and support and the technology experience – is seamless.”

High-Growth Opportunities

Rubrik is among several providers of data management and protection that are relatively new to the scene. The company has 3,200 customers, with more than 200 spending more than $1 million for its data management offerings. In December, a classified U.S. agency awarded Rubrik with a contract valued at more than $10 million. Rubrik also recently acquired Igneius, a startup that provides management for unstructured data.

Founded in 2014 as a cloud-based alternative to incumbent ISVs, Rubrik competes with Commvault, Veeam and Zerto, among others. Rubrik also has several cloud pure-play competitors that are attracting significant investments, including Cohesity and Druva.

Cohesity, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund, last month claimed its valuation increased to $3.7 billion. When Cohesity received $250 million in funding a year ago, the company said it was valued at $2.5 billion last year. Last month, Cohesity announced a tender offer of approximately $145 million for employee shares, led by Steadfast Capital Ventures.

This week, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) led a $147 million investment with Neuberger Berman into Druva. The investment values the company at $2 billion, Druva claims.

For its part, Rubrik received a $261 million investment led by Bain Capital Ventures, along with earlier investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and IVP. Rubrik claimed it has a valuation of $3.3 billion, but that was more than two years ago.