Rubrik Names Global Channel Chief

Rubrik, a provider of tools for managing data in a cloud environment, this week has appointed Bertrand Yansouni to be the company’s new vice president of worldwide channels.

Before joining Rubrik, Yansouni was the vice president of global partner sales and strategic partnerships for Google Cloud. Prior to that position, Yansouni has worked in various sales capacities at IBM, VMware, Riverbed Technology and Cloudera. At Rubrik, Yansouni will report to Mark Smith, executive vice president of global sales and business development.

As Rubrik moves to extend its channel, Yansouni says the first-priority is to increase the amount of technical education Rubrick provides as part of an effort make the pre-sales tools the company has developed for its direct sales force available to the channel.

Yansouni says the scope of that effort potential includes every solution provider addressing the needs of both enterprise IT and small-to-medium (SMB) business. The Rubrik product portfolio spans everything from backup and recovery software that can be deployed on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) based on a network attached storage (NAS) software the company has developed.

“We think this is a perfect fit for the channel,” says Yansouni.

Naturally, there’s no shortage of tools and platforms addressing data protection and management requirements in the age of the cloud. Rubrik, however, has raised over $180 million and has been valued at $1.3 billion. That would suggest that a pure software-approach to data protection and management in the cloud has some potential to gain traction at the expense of well-entrenched rivals.

Yansouni says one of the avenues Rubrik is anxious to explore is the rise of DevOps processes within IT organizations that, among other things, programmatically implement data protection and management software by invoking REST application programming interfaces (APIs).

Regardless of the approach, data protection especially has already proven itself to be a killer cloud application. The challenge for channel partners is determining how much appeal a new approach to an age-old problem might have.