Rubrik, Sinha says, is re-inventing Veritas for the multi-cloud world: “We’re the reincarnation of Veritas.”

Companies coming from a storage view of the world are reinventing Data Domain for the modern era, and talking about secondary storage consolidation. He includes Actifio and Cohesity in this group.

We might also include Catalogic. Sinha says Data Domain and Cohesity just take a dump generated by a source database. Because they don’t generate metadata about data sources, then they don’t possess the granularity that Rubrik does.

Veeam is also in the data management software camp, and has found great success with small and medium enterprises. In many ways it is similar to Rubrik, but Sinha says it is focussed on small and medium enterprises while Rubrik is enterprise-focussed.

Commvault is a Rubrik precursor and built for the last generation of data centres – the pre-cloud era, Sinha says, and the Data Domains and Cohesitys sit behind Veeam and Commvault.

Datos IO is in the data management software camp. According to Sinha, it has focussed on the distributed database area, which is a tiny part of the market*. If it grows to an interesting and significant size, then Rubrik will extend its offering to cover it.

He says that if you want to be an enterprise data management company, you need a strong metadata platform. “We combined that with data definition and we have self-describing data. That’s our core innovation.” With it you can take data from one place and power it up elsewhere.

In the next three to five years, Sinha thinks, there will still be a storage-centric view versus a software data management view. But we’ll be in a multi-cloud world and in the cloud there is no storage.

The cloud gives you storage. What business customers will need is data management and the software data management view will, he implies, prevail.