Why HYCU Sees SAAS Data Protection As The Next Enterprise Priority

[00:00:03] - [Speaker 0]
Hi there. Welcome to Across the Tech Fund, The US European webcast and podcast covering the main technology conferences and events hosted by David Marshall, Neil Hughes, and myself, Anthony Savas. We are all Avid Technology Conference attendees visiting the conferences and events big and small around Europe, The US. In this show, we have a very special guest. Over the years, we have attended events addressed by cloud and software as a service, that's SAS, data protection vendor, HYCU, including recently in New York, where the company was a participant on the IT press tour, was attended by journalists and analysts.

[00:00:40] - [Speaker 0]
IQ's R Cloud technology is now a well established solution that helps companies manage and protect their data across on premise, hybrid and cloud environments and it is sold by cloud service providers, managed service providers and system integrators. IQ was quick to point out to companies that the software they were buying on demand from software providers through the cloud was not automatically and comprehensively protected and backed up by those providers and some of them are big providers as well. So companies were leaving themselves open to both cyber criminals and potential data catastrophes through data loss. As more and more companies are going down the software as a service route, the market for SaaS protection is obviously expanding, which is obviously good news for companies like HYCU. Before we move forward though, let's introduce ourselves, David.

[00:01:32] - [Speaker 1]
Hey, everyone. It's good to be back on another episode of Across the Tech Pond. I'm David Marshall. I'm cohost of ATP and the owner and operator of vmblog.com here in The US, and I'm in the Austin, Texas area. Neil.

[00:01:48] - [Speaker 2]
And I'm Neil Hughes. I host a number of podcasts over on the tech talks network, tech talks daily being the most popular. I also write for cyber news. I currently live in The UK, work from that side of the tech pond. But at the moment, I'm in The US reporting on another event, but great to see you all again.

[00:02:07] - [Speaker 0]
That just proves we do actually travel and we're not doing this in our spare bedrooms. So that's good. I'm Anthony Savas. I'm a contributor to IT Europa, which is a pan European channel title for managed service providers, VARs, system integrators and cloud service providers. I also write for IoT now and also something called Techled which is a communications also and it's quite new.

[00:02:29] - [Speaker 0]
Right, as mentioned we have a very special guest and they're the founder and chief executive of Haiku no less. Can you introduce yourself?

[00:02:38] - [Speaker 3]
Hi, I'm Simon Taylor and I'm the CEO and founder of Haiku. Anthony, it's a pleasure to be here today.

[00:02:43] - [Speaker 0]
Thanks for being here Simon. First question from me, Maybe an obvious one for some of the listeners who don't know HYCU that well. I know there's a lot to do, but let's get this out of the way. Where does HYCU fit into the current cloud data management protection space? What exactly do you do?

[00:02:58] - [Speaker 3]
Sure. So HYCU stands for hybrid cloud uptime, H Y C U. We were trying to think about a word that meant all the data and a language boiled down to a small, elegant package. But the premise behind HYCU was very simple. How do you simplify the entire data protection space, providing equivalent levels of backup and recovery support across on premises, public cloud, and SaaS?

[00:03:23] - [Speaker 3]
And from the very get go in April 2018, when we founded the company, was always the premise. It was how do you make it really easy to back up and more importantly, recover your data regardless of the source of the origin of that data? We saw companies that were using five, even 10 different backup products, if you can believe it. And we said there's got to be one ring to rule them all. There's got to be a Swiss army knife of sorts in the data protection space, and that's what we set out to build.

[00:03:49] - [Speaker 3]
Today, we've got 4,600 customers in 78 countries and a 91 NPS score, one of the best in the industry. So very, very proud of the team that's been on this journey with us and very grateful to folks like yourselves who have been actively speaking with Haiku and my team for the last eight years.

[00:04:07] - [Speaker 1]
Simon, David Marshall here. It's always a great pleasure to speak with you. I always enjoy our conversations.

[00:04:14] - [Speaker 3]
Same here, Dev.

[00:04:16] - [Speaker 1]
So as has kind of been mentioned, the market for SaaS data protection is growing, as we all know. Could you maybe explain to the audience what some of the drivers are for that? And why are companies like HYCU able to take advantage? And maybe even talk about, I guess, kind of what's special about HYCU's R Cloud in the market?

[00:04:38] - [Speaker 3]
Sure. Let let's just start at the top. Software as a service. I think when we talk about SaaS, there's a lot of misnomers. What is SaaS?

[00:04:45] - [Speaker 3]
What does it mean? And I think the obvious ones come to mind. We see people people think about Salesforce. They think about Office three sixty five. Maybe they think about Enter ID.

[00:04:55] - [Speaker 3]
The truth is there are 30,000 SaaS services offered just in The United States alone. 30,000. And every single one of those SaaS services all have the same thing in common, which is what we call the shared responsibility model. Very simply, that means their job as a SaaS provider is to provide you the value of their service. But the data that you put into that service is yours to protect.

[00:05:23] - [Speaker 3]
And this is something that a lot of people don't understand. They don't think about. And certainly, Dave, when you and I started talking about this, I don't know, four or five years ago, nobody was talking about it. And we kept coming to market and basically saying, look, SaaS is the biggest obstacle to true data protection. Because out of all of the world's 30,000 SaaS services at the time, only five of them were backed up at all.

[00:05:47] - [Speaker 3]
So we went through the entire Gartner Magic Quadrant, and we added up in aggregate how many SaaS services all these supposed leaders are protecting, and it was only five. And we said to this 30,000 SaaS services, five of them are protected. I wonder how many SaaS services the average company uses. We ran a survey. The answer was 212.

[00:06:07] - [Speaker 3]
So 30,000 SaaS services, 212 combinations of those 30,000 in any particular company, and only five with any level of Gartner Enterprise Protection. That's really what we set out to change, Dave. We sort of woke up one morning and said, this is going to be a real problem. Because if people don't understand the need to protect SaaS, they're leaving themselves massively open to all sorts of different cyber attacks. Well, we built a platform that obviously supports 92 integrations and growing 12 times more than anyone else, became the world leader in SaaS data protection.

[00:06:41] - [Speaker 3]
But the second part of your question goes beyond that. It's really, well, what's driving the understanding today? We know that four years ago, nobody understood this was an issue. What's changed? And the simple truth is the market has started to wake up to the risk, and there's a number of examples of this.

[00:06:59] - [Speaker 3]
You look at the MGM casino disaster, $1,200,000,000 in vendor losses because they were locked out of their single sign on provider. You look at Snowflake supply chain attacks. You look at even CrowdStrike, which, yes, was a patch management issue. But I'll tell you, my 75 year old mother called me the day CrowdStrike went down and said, what's this CrowdStrike? I don't like them.

[00:07:20] - [Speaker 3]
What what are you doing about them? I said, mom, they're fine. Don't worry. But I'll be back up and running in a minute. Well, I couldn't get on my flight, all these kinds of things.

[00:07:28] - [Speaker 3]
And so all of a sudden, this sort of amorphous world of third party SaaS has come to roost. The chickens have come to roost, and people are kinda going, oh, wait. This does impact me. This is something I need to think about. And there's haiku sort of showing up and going, well, we can run an R graph scan and help you visualize all of the SaaS services you have.

[00:07:50] - [Speaker 3]
Because guess what? You probably don't know what SaaS you have at this point. Once we help you discover where all of the SaaS is, we can tell you what's backed up and what's not. We have a marketplace you can pull up where you can automatically add data protection across your on prem, your public cloud, and SaaS. We provide you with the most comprehensive level of complete protection you can get anywhere in the world today.

[00:08:13] - [Speaker 3]
And again, that's a very bold claim, etcetera, but the numbers just don't lie. We have 12 times more support for SaaS services than anyone else. And on top of that, we've partnered with Anthropic, and we've built a low build, low code development platform. So if you've got a SaaS vendor we don't support, we can easily add that integration, or you can yourself. And so I what we're starting to see is a company, Haiku, that came to the market, maybe a little bit early on the SaaS and cloud side, but with a very clear vision that we were gonna protect the world SaaS.

[00:08:45] - [Speaker 3]
And here you go. You fast forward five years later, past COVID, and all of a sudden, are going, yeah, that really is a problem. Thank God we've got a vendor that can actually help us out with that.

[00:08:55] - [Speaker 0]
David, do you wanna come back there?

[00:08:58] - [Speaker 1]
If you could just kind of dig in just a little bit into the HYCU R Cloud. Talk about that a little bit.

[00:09:05] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. So so, you know, going back to what I was saying, Dave, about and I know you know this, but going back to what I was saying about the world SaaS, right? You have 30,000 SaaS vendors in the world, and we realized that it would take unlimited time, money, and resources to be able to back up and recover all those. And by the time you did, there'll be another 30,000 that have sprouted up. And so the question became, how can we ever build a platform that will keep pace with the needs of this incredibly evolving market?

[00:09:33] - [Speaker 3]
And in fact, this is why the data protection vendors have predominantly ignored SaaS in the past. The TAMs by themselves are too small to invest in. In aggregate, they're too complicated to build. So what do you do? You just say it's not a problem and move on and focus on on prem and cloud.

[00:09:51] - [Speaker 3]
Well, we said we're not going to give up on this problem. We're not going to give up on the customer. Instead of sort of shying away from it, we embrace the problem. And we said, well, if you don't have unlimited time, money and resources to build something, what can you do? And this goes back to an old mentor of mine who had said to me, Simon, if you ever become a CEO, don't be the kind of CEO who thinks for 10,000 people.

[00:10:14] - [Speaker 3]
Be the CEO who lets 10,000 smart people think for them. And it's an old axiom, but it's a good one. And I remembered that and it stuck in my noggin. And I was sitting there one day and I thought, well, what if we didn't have to build 30,000 SaaS integrations? What if we could get 30,000 SaaS vendors to build for us?

[00:10:32] - [Speaker 3]
And that's when the light bulb went off. It's kinda like, oh my god. That's our penicillin moment. And you kinda leave a bologna sandwich out one day, you wake up the next day, you've got a magical medication that saves the world. That that that really was our our watershed moment here at Haiku.

[00:10:46] - [Speaker 3]
Because what we thought about was, well, what if we were to build a low code development platform and then make it really easy for SaaS vendors to write to us so that they we can kinda democratize the world of data protection by building a marketplace that's built on our platform, only works on our platform, is secured by our platform, but in which the specifications of the individual SaaS sources could actually be driven into our model and then added as applications in an application store. And we really took a page, I think, out of the Salesforce handbook. Instead of building every single feature for CRM, they opened up a marketplace and they let third parties write to it. And it's been phenomenally successful. We've now got 92 of those integrations in our marketplace.

[00:11:34] - [Speaker 3]
Companies like iManage that are market leaders when it comes to the legal vertical, for example, there was no way they were going to be able to convince a Gartner Magic Quadrant data protection vendor other than IQ to go out and spend the time, money, resources to protect them. But they knew they needed protection. They have an incredibly smart, forward thinking CEO, Neil Arrujo. And he reached out and he said, hey, Simon, I've heard about this whole R Cloud thing. We'd like to do it.

[00:11:59] - [Speaker 3]
And so his team used the R Cloud development platform. They built the integration. They own that IP. They own that integration and gets sold directly through HaiQ. So we have provided for the first time in the history of humanity, a real platform for third party SaaS vendors to build integrations and give their customers the enterprise grade data protection they deserve.

[00:12:23] - [Speaker 3]
So it's been it's been a great ride. It's been a lot of fun, and it's wonderful to see the SaaS vendors themselves, eyes open, kind of saying, I don't want to be a backup company. Right? And I don't want to go beg a backup company to build us. I've got 500,000,000 ARR, and I've got thousands of customers and they deserve enterprise grade data protection.

[00:12:42] - [Speaker 3]
Oh, we'll just build on HYCU. And I think that for us was the real game changing moment in sort of our history.

[00:12:48] - [Speaker 0]
Great. Thanks for that. Neil, you had a question.

[00:12:51] - [Speaker 2]
Yeah. I mean, Simon, I think we spoke at the January about SaaS data protection, and good I didn't get to meet you at the IT press tour recently. But since our last conversation, obviously, we're talking about our cloud today. So is there anything you can expand on in terms of support that you're actually providing companies right now? And, also, an update on some of the alliances that HYCU has made with other vendors in the go to market ecosystem.

[00:13:17] - [Speaker 2]
Because without revealing any spoilers, there's a pretty big one in there, isn't

[00:13:22] - [Speaker 3]
Very true. Why don't we start with the partnership? HYCU announced a very exciting partnership with Dell earlier this year. And the Dell Technologies partnership, we sit on the ETC price book, the extended technologies price book, makes us the only data protection vendor to support on prem public cloud and SaaS that's actually sold by Dell themselves. And the reason that Dell reached out to us when we started to build this great relationship is because of Haiku's bring your own storage model.

[00:13:50] - [Speaker 3]
A lot of backup recovery vendors have kind of become quasi storage companies in a way. They're out there. They're selling their own box, and they wanna fill up that storage box. Haiku's always taken a bring your own target approach, saying, hey, we don't wanna own your data. We believe it's safer for your data to sit in your tenant, whether that's in your cloud, whether that's in your data room, whether that's wherever it might be.

[00:14:15] - [Speaker 3]
What we did with Dell is we actually built a data domain and DD Boost integration so that now you can actually buy HYCU and get all the value and power out of data domain, put those two things together for deduplication, and you would have an incredible end to end solution. And I think it's phenomenal because out of all the technologies, I mean, many you guys have been around the block for many years. I won't say how many. But but, you know, can you imagine can you imagine a product that has been loved for as long as data domain has? I mean, this is a product that has just been in market for decades, and people are still obsessed with it.

[00:14:53] - [Speaker 3]
And so I think I think the ability for us to go in now with with data domain virtual edition, DDVE, and say to customers, guess what? You can now run data domain in the cloud. You can dedup Google, Azure, AWS. All of these new modern SaaS workloads you're running, you can dedup those too. You can use data domain everywhere.

[00:15:13] - [Speaker 3]
People are finding more and new kinds of value from that data domain, and I think that's just incredibly exciting.

[00:15:20] - [Speaker 2]
When you're talking about exploring the art of the possible there, we are at that magical time of year where we got one eye on 2026. I'm curious. What what kind of feedback have you had from from customers that are are starting to reexplore this? And what what could happen?

[00:15:35] - [Speaker 3]
Incredible. Yeah. It's just been incredible. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of some of the world's largest enterprises banging on the door saying like, this is this is what we need. This is what we've been waiting for.

[00:15:44] - [Speaker 3]
The other thing that I've found incredible has been the feedback from the hyperscalers, you know, talking to folks at Google, at Azure, at AWS, not folks that I would necessarily have thought would have been this excited about the partnership, but they're like, you know what? We want to sell with Dell. We love Dell. Dell has got the world's biggest sales machine, and we've never really been able to be a part of it. And Haiku operates as almost like a bridge between those air those areas.

[00:16:08] - [Speaker 3]
So the the response has been phenomenal. The customer appreciation has been just dynamic. I won't mention who, but there's a major sports team in New England. And I was talking to the CIO, and he said, he's like, this is what I've been waiting for. He goes, I love Dell.

[00:16:24] - [Speaker 3]
I love these guys. But I've always needed that bridge between data domain and the hyperscalers, data domain and SaaS. Now I can kind of tie all this together with a bow and give myself that enterprise grade data protection. So, I mean, that's just been absolutely wonderful. And then, I think your other question was about our cloud and about some of the response that we're seeing.

[00:16:46] - [Speaker 3]
And again, there's so many of these new integrations. We launched Box this year. We launched Slack this year. We launched iManage this year. We've launched, I think, two dozen of these integrations just in the last six months.

[00:16:59] - [Speaker 3]
And it just doesn't slow down. And it's been a lot of fun building this sort of cross company go to market motions. Because the wonderful thing is that once these SaaS vendors build on our platform, they know they can trust that data protection. And so what they immediately do is say to their sellers, Hey, when your customer asks how they can recover this data, point them to HYCU. That is the preference.

[00:17:24] - [Speaker 3]
And so I think we've built this wonderful symbiotic relationship with the SaaS vendors. And I'm really excited to see how that continues to grow 2026.

[00:17:33] - [Speaker 2]
Exciting time. Great.

[00:17:34] - [Speaker 0]
Next question from me, Simon. You've mentioned workloads and integrations etc. So I think we're approaching like about 100 now in total. By the end of next year, mean approximately, many do you think we'll have in a year's time? And secondly, imagine guys like you are going for the low hanging fruit, the big software package what people want from Salesforce, Microsoft etc.

[00:17:59] - [Speaker 0]
Some of the other ones you've mentioned, but obviously there are some niche ones. Mean you mentioned the legal profession there, but how about other things like compliance and critical national infrastructure and all these other areas which people haven't actually thought of who it's not software people are using in their bedrooms and offices, it's other stuff. What are you doing in that area, Simon?

[00:18:18] - [Speaker 3]
One of the areas that I'm I'm really keen on is HR, actually, and and the people function. Because if you think about where the core assets of a business are, it's in your CRM, it's in your ERP, it's in your HR modules, it's in your finance SaaS apps as well. And if you look at Workday, you look at BambooHR, you look at some of these, realize you've got an awful lot of data in there. You've got salary information, you've got personal identifiable information, You've got things that could really legally create compliance issues for a company. And so we've added BambooHR this year.

[00:18:53] - [Speaker 3]
We're working on Workday now. We are going to continue to explore the HR kind of horizontal. The other thing that I'm really, really becoming interested in is when you look at the compliant industries. And I keep looking at legal and health care. You know, I think health care, actually had a little procedure done earlier this year, and I was on the gurney being pushed down the hospital thing.

[00:19:17] - [Speaker 3]
And I just saw the same vendor's name over and over and over and over again on every screen. And it just suddenly occurred to me, my God, that's none of that's backed up, is it? Right? And so literally, right before they put me under, I'm thinking they're gonna go back up. And so I think this is the key, right?

[00:19:35] - [Speaker 3]
Is that we have the power to democratize data protection. We have the power to give emboldened SaaS vendors to lean into backup and recovery and say, you know what? I never wanted to be a backup vendor. I couldn't be bothered to do that. Why would I?

[00:19:49] - [Speaker 3]
That's not my core business. Thank God these guys are here. They'll go take care of that for me. And so so I think I think leaning into those powerful relationships is going to be part and parcel of what we do next year for sure.

[00:20:01] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. How about the government sector? Is that something you're active in in any way or looking to make more hay in?

[00:20:07] - [Speaker 3]
It's pretty surprising, always to me. I shouldn't say that. But it's amazing actually how successful we've been in the United States federal government. We've got an amazing team there led by Gary Krohn. And what we've been able to do, I would say about a third of our business is actually US Fed.

[00:20:24] - [Speaker 3]
And it's incredible because they love the simplicity. They love the ability to if you think about governments, they typically have too few resources to do too many jobs, like all of us, but I think it's especially apparent in the government sector. And the simplicity with which Haiku can solve a wide variety of their problems is just critical. We also have an incredible partnership with Craig Abbott and Carisoft. Craig's a great mentor of mine, a wonderful human being, and one of the most powerful distributors in The US federal sector.

[00:20:54] - [Speaker 3]
And then the last thing I would say is that outside of The US, there are other friendly nations that we do business with. And I'll just give you, I love this example. There is a Navy in the world that was out there trying to figure out which data protection technology they should buy. And I thought this was probably the most interesting and creative POC of all time. They took three vendors.

[00:21:18] - [Speaker 3]
I won't say who, but we were one of them. And they loaded all three of us up onto a ship. Right? Luckily, I didn't have to go personally, but they loaded they loaded the bits up onto a ship. And without any IT person on board, they sent the ship out for six weeks.

[00:21:32] - [Speaker 3]
And they said, when you come back, captain, tell us which one you were able to back up and recover data with. And by the time he got back six weeks later, he said the only one we could get going was ICOO.

[00:21:42] - [Speaker 2]
Wow.

[00:21:42] - [Speaker 3]
And and that's how they went with us. And so for me, it was kinda like that is the ultimate that is a case study in simplicity and a case study in what we really strive to do here in the business. It's to make things easier. It's to make sure we can support our customers, but ultimately, to make sure that data protection is actually a good time. It's something people want to use, they can use.

[00:22:04] - [Speaker 3]
They don't need professional services to deploy it, they can just get it going, kind of set and forget and move on. And so we're really grateful for the customers that have tried us over the years and customers we have today, and just thrilled about the future as well.

[00:22:17] - [Speaker 0]
And just quickly, I mentioned about the number of workloads in APIs by the end of next year. Is it realistic to maybe approach 200 by the end of next year or 150? Sort of things

[00:22:27] - [Speaker 3]
are 100 the and 50 for sure. 200 perhaps. I mean, I think it depends honestly, Anthony, on, you know, many of them are in the same family. Some of them you end up with 10 different integrations based on this. It also depends on the SaaS vendors who give us a goal.

[00:22:41] - [Speaker 3]
But I would say 50 to 100 additional is certainly not out of the question at all.

[00:22:45] - [Speaker 0]
Thank you. David, next question to you.

[00:22:48] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's kind of based on what we just talked about. Maybe if we could expand on it a little bit more, Simon, the global data protection rules and demands that are now set by industry regulators and national governments, they're widening. When I think of, and I know we've kind of had this discussion in the past, but when I think of things like DORA for banks and financial services or next to critical infrastructure suppliers and proposed AI acts even. These different sectors and regulations and compliance issues have to be a potential sweet spot for HYCU. Right?

[00:23:26] - [Speaker 3]
A 100%. But let's let's take it beyond HYCU. I think DORA and this is the first time we've really seen regulators get it right. And it I'm not saying that it's not gonna irritate people. But the truth is that in the DORA framework, it clearly says that you must have a local copy of your data.

[00:23:44] - [Speaker 3]
And that might seem like a really, really simple low bar. But if you consider that the average financial company has over 200 different SaaS applications, and they have a copy of not one of them, that becomes a very significant challenge. I've heard over and over again, well, I'll just call the SaaS vendor and ask for a copy of my data. Good luck. We've tried that with 75 of the vendors, and we've gotten we've gotten legal letters from 10 of them.

[00:24:09] - [Speaker 3]
Right? So so it's just not something that SaaS vendors are prepared to do. The simplest answer to that problem is back up your data. Give yourself a local copy. If you can't get a local copy from your SaaS vendor, demand that they build an integration on the Haiku marketplace.

[00:24:26] - [Speaker 3]
It will only take them a week. It's incredibly important that these SaaS vendors are told by their customers, you must provide a local copy. If you don't wanna provide a local copy, just turn on Haiku. Just go to the Haiku website and register, and they'll build an integration for you in their marketplace, and then you'll give us a local copy. I mean, that's how simple this thing is.

[00:24:47] - [Speaker 3]
And we get SaaS vendors all the time now give us a call and they say, oh, wait. Didn't know we had to do that. Right? And usually what happens is it's the CISO at the SaaS company who suddenly says in a board meeting, well, Dora says we need a local copy of our customer's data. The next question.

[00:25:04] - [Speaker 3]
Well, do we need to have a local copy of the data? Well, not really. It's the customer that needs to have the local copy. Great. Next issue.

[00:25:11] - [Speaker 3]
Next issue. Right? Because it's not the responsibility of the SaaS vendor. It's the responsibility of the customer. But you as a customer have a lot of power to demand excellence from your vendors.

[00:25:22] - [Speaker 3]
And so what I keep telling people is just tell them to call HYCU, and we will help them to give you the copy that you rightfully deserve, And it won't cost them a dime. And so I think this is the right way to kind of think about this problem. We are democratizing data protection. We are helping you with your NIST two standards. We are helping you to be DORA compliant.

[00:25:43] - [Speaker 3]
But we got to wake up. We got to wake up and understand that this is the challenge out there and start doing what's right.

[00:25:49] - [Speaker 0]
Neil, you have a key question in the present technology climate here.

[00:25:54] - [Speaker 2]
You say key question, possibly quite a predictable one. As someone that attends many tech conferences, I hear a lot about AI, and a lot of providers are promising the earth when it comes to bundling AI in their solutions. Sometimes it's not even AI, but that is another episode completely on its own. But I've got to ask you here. What's the haiku AI story at the moment?

[00:26:14] - [Speaker 2]
What what can we expect to see in the coming months? And having said that, is it even needed in our cloud at the moment? Is it doing a good enough job as it stands without AI?

[00:26:23] - [Speaker 3]
Well, so first, I'll begin with an anecdote. I was doing one of these podcasts the other day, and just as a joke, they asked me the question about AI, and I said, what's AI? With a straight face, and my my PR guy made me delete that section. Then it might be a might be a company limiting move to make that joke. But no.

[00:26:40] - [Speaker 3]
But in all seriousness, I think I think AI does it plays a crucial role in every business. I I think if you look at the facts versus fiction of AI today, I think that it is truly helping developers, and it is truly helping testers, and it's truly revolutionizing the way that software is coded. I think that's the truth. I think the fiction today is that every company's rolled out 30 different amazing AI products, and all of those tools are drastically changing the way we function as a business. I think beyond LLM is ChatGPT and the like, where we're really seeing current present day value is at the engineering level.

[00:27:20] - [Speaker 3]
Now that's not to say that, you know, law firms aren't automating everything. That's not to say that, you know, we aren't simplifying processes, etcetera. I think the real test for AI, though, is going to be when companies like Haiku bring out truly distinct value ads that sort of introduce an element of magic into into ordinary tasks. So what I mean by that is, let's say that today it takes three hours to back up and recover, you know, with Haiku from deployment all the way to to completion. Can we get that down to three seconds with the touch of a button?

[00:27:55] - [Speaker 3]
That's part one. I think the second piece is we talked about that low code development platform. It's actually an enriched Anthropic LLM where we've we've trained Anthropic on how to code data protection in integrations for our cloud. And so we actually are using AI to automate the process of allowing those SaaS vendors to build on our platform. So there's a little bit of magic there.

[00:28:19] - [Speaker 3]
But I think I think the next generation here is if you think about what Haiku has access to. It is an understanding. It's obviously not the data itself, but it's a clear understanding of the data. So I think that the reality is that when we think about AI today, the important area is how many resources is this reducing? How much efficiency is being sort of incorporated to solve a problem?

[00:28:48] - [Speaker 3]
And I think this is why I always talk about AI with humanity, because I think that we should if if you look at AI in binary terms, you ultimately end up looking at job loss. But if you look at AI from the perspective of, hey. I've got 500 people working for my company today. We don't need to fire anybody. What we need to do is make sure that these 500 people can do the work of 550.

[00:29:12] - [Speaker 3]
Right? I think that's where you start to see that evolution of AI. But for Haiku, it's about how do we make it easier than ever before to add those integrations? How do we allow you as a customer to do more with your backup data? And just as a little bit of a teaser, in January, we're gonna be coming out with a very significant announcement.

[00:29:32] - [Speaker 3]
And I can promise you that this group will be one of the first to know about sort of the next iteration or evolution of our cloud. And I think we've got some really, really exciting news on the way.

[00:29:43] - [Speaker 2]
Oh, I do love a good teaser. You got me there, son.

[00:29:46] - [Speaker 0]
Try harder, Neil. Come on. Let's get out of him here.

[00:29:50] - [Speaker 3]
That's why I keep my PR guy right next to me.

[00:29:52] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Somebody to keep you. Yeah. You heard it here first.

[00:29:55] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah, exactly.

[00:29:57] - [Speaker 0]
Okay. Well, next question, you may add to that. I don't know. I might get it out of you. We want to leave the audience with something here, Simon.

[00:30:03] - [Speaker 0]
In the midst of spiraling data theft etc, and including ransomware, including the challenges of AI in the way that's actually widened the cyber security footprint in many ways, in the way people can attack data. Are there free tips you can give our audience protecting the three essential elements of their technology in terms of cyber security protection, compliance in their technology stack? A total of three things, one in each of those areas protection, compliance and technology stacks. What could you leave our audience with in terms of what you would recommend looking at to make sure they got covered?

[00:30:38] - [Speaker 3]
You know, on the protection side, I wanna talk about insider threat. So I think if you ask any CISO today, what is the number one problem you grapple with? Doesn't matter if an organization is a 100 people or a 100,000. There's probably two to five people in that giant organization that create a systematic and repetitive threat to the entire organization and its business. It is the job of the CISO to find out who those five people are.

[00:31:06] - [Speaker 3]
And so the extent to which you can use data protection, data, and AI to identify anomalous behavior that will stop you from having to deal with those problems. I think that's a massive and massive win for your company. So focusing on insider threats, I think is something we're going to be talking a lot about over the next year. And I think it's something that is going to be driven by the confluence of cybersecurity, data protection, and AI. To me, that's the sort of triangle that's in effect here.

[00:31:37] - [Speaker 3]
And I think it's incredibly important. The second thing I would say is that from a security perspective, AI is making it cheaper and faster to deploy malicious attacks on civilians. And so the more data you have in the more places with the lack of protection that most people have today, it's making it so easy and so cheap on the dark web to literally go on, spend $11, and execute a dark web based attack. So I think I think we need to be sure that we are counterbalancing that with the one thing we know can protect you, which is the ability to recover your data and the ability to get back up and running. Remediation is the key.

[00:32:19] - [Speaker 3]
Prevention and detection are great until they don't work. They are absolutely incredible, and they're sexy, and you should buy them. But the moment that they miss something, the moment that Patriot missile gets through gets through, you're in trouble. And so I think the most important thing to do here is to make sure that you can back up and recover all of your data. You know, from a compliance perspective, we are seeing more and more instances of CSOs having been gone after by the United States government by regulators.

[00:32:50] - [Speaker 3]
The CSOs are being targeted. We've seen CSOs go to jail because they don't have the right backup in place, because they couldn't recover from an attack. This has become personal for CSOs. And so I think being able to have those conversations at the board level, you know, as a CSO raising the fact that you're personally liable and you need the budget to make sure you've got true resilience in place, not just for your on prem, not just for your cloud, but for all of this SaaS. Because we know one thing.

[00:33:21] - [Speaker 3]
50% of ransomware attacks are occurring with SaaS as the source. So your SaaS is the weapon of choice for these terrorists. You've got to protect it. You've gotta be ready. And then the last thing I would just say is that overall, we are not going to see a decline in malicious behavior or ransomware attacks or cyber attacks probably ever.

[00:33:47] - [Speaker 3]
It's only going to get worse now. And the trick here is to have an incredibly secure plan to practice and to spend time on that plan so that your incident response plan is up to date and you've trained your folks across the organization. More often than not, the folks who never think about this are the ones who have the biggest challenge when it's go time. So so, again, unfortunately, there's not a lot of happy news there. The happy news, I will say, is the tools are getting stronger.

[00:34:19] - [Speaker 3]
The tools are getting better. Haiku is getting broader and broader. You know? So if you haven't looked at us, take a look. Let us help you to visualize where all your data is, protect your data and make it instantly recoverable in the event of a cyber attack.

[00:34:34] - [Speaker 0]
Right. And obviously, there's more to hear in January by the sounds of it. That's right. All linked to some of the things you say there, no doubt. Well, hope the audience has been suitably informed there.

[00:34:46] - [Speaker 0]
We're running out of time now. So just remains to say goodbye from me, Anthony Savas, and thanks for being here, Simon.

[00:34:53] - [Speaker 3]
Absolute pleasure, Anthony. Great to see you, Dave. Great to see everyone else as well.

[00:34:57] - [Speaker 1]
I I just wanna say it's great to catch up and learn from Simon. Every time I I I have the chance to speak to you, I walk away informed, educated, and entertained. So thank you again for doing that. And then thanks to everyone watching or listening. We'll obviously keep providing great content like this from both sides of the pond as long as you folks keep consuming it.

[00:35:19] - [Speaker 1]
So thank you everybody. Neil?

[00:35:22] - [Speaker 2]
Yeah. Big thank you, Simon. Hopefully, next time we'll get to meet in person. And also a big thanks big thank you to everyone watching and listening. Please tell us what you would like to cover more of, what you would like to see in 2026, as well as Simon coming back in January, of course.

[00:35:38] - [Speaker 2]
But outside anybody listening or watching, if you see us out there on the show floor at any conference, please come over and say hello. But more than anything, Simon, thank you for for coming on today.

[00:35:48] - [Speaker 3]
Absolute pleasure, Neil. Great to be here. Thanks very much, Dave.