New Cloud Daddy CEO aims to 'tell the world' about AWS protection
The new CEO of AWS data protection provider Cloud Daddy is looking to tell his company’s story and drastically increase its customer count.
“We’ve got to get people to know about Cloud Daddy,” said Spencer Kupferman, the former president and CEO of reporting and automation platform provider Global Software.
Kupferman takes over for Cloud Daddy founder Joe Merces, who is now the company’s president and chief product officer.
Where Cloud Daddy will focus
The Kupferman Family Office recently invested in Cloud Daddy and took a roughly 20% equity position in the company. Privately held Cloud Daddy is funded by angel investors and current shareholders such as Kupferman.
The new CEO said he was impressed with Cloud Daddy’s technology and ability to scale.
Kupferman started at Cloud Daddy on May 1 and has been working on building a team. For example, he brought over the vice president of marketing from Global Software.
Kupferman had several executive roles at Global Software (now InsightSoftware) over 22 years. What Cloud Daddy needs is for someone to “tell the world about it,” which Kupferman said he did at Global Software. Starting in the sales department there, he made sure customers were driving the enhancement schedule.
“I know how to implement a customer-centric philosophy,” Kupferman said.
Now he has a lofty goal — getting Cloud Daddy to 1,000 paying customers within 18 months. It currently has about 25 paying customers of varied size of its Cloud Daddy Secure Backup product and another 65 using the freemium version.
Kupferman said the company can reach that total through a combination of direct sales, managed service providers and customers trying and buying the product on the website.
George Crump, president and founder of IT analysis firm Storage Switzerland, said the customer goal is possible if Cloud Daddy can improve its marketing and gain visibility.
“There’s a mass amount of customers there,” Crump said.
Also key to Cloud Daddy’s success is making sure AWS users understand the cost of not having protection. Cloud-native data protection products have the challenge that most customers wrongly assume the cloud automatically backs up and secures data, Crump said. Explaining where AWS protection ends and where Cloud Daddy picks up is critical.
“Your biggest competition when doing native cloud backup is nothing,” Crump said.
There is also competition from larger vendors in a market that has picked up steam. In the last two years, Druva acquired CloudRanger and Veeam bought N2WS, both for AWS backup and recovery.
Secure Backup: Now and later
Crump said Cloud Daddy seems to hit most of the check boxes for this type of data protection, and needs to differentiate from what’s out there through third-party vendors as well as the recently launched AWS Backup. The security element is a good starting point, Crump said.
Cloud Daddy Secure Backup includes anti-malware intelligent threat detection, AWS web application firewall integration, instance firewalls and security group management.
Crump said the product is easier to start working than other backup platforms on the market.
The ease of use is also a notch above the competition, Kupferman said, “more like 2025” than present day.
Cloud Daddy is AWS native and uses the public cloud provider’s APIs. The product backs up volumes, instances and databases, within AWS, from one region to another. Cloud Daddy uses its own technology for the data protection. Features include application and crash-consistent backups, and cross-region and cross-account backup and restore.
Secure Backup also provides infrastructure management.
Version 1.5 launched last week and features bring-your-own-licensing, the ability to copy backups to Amazon S3 and Glacier, a virtual firewall dashboard, application self-backup and backup status enhancements.
Version 2, a larger update, is scheduled for the end of the summer and is expected to include more artificial intelligence.
Cloud Daddy, based in Princeton, N.J., began in May 2017 and launched its product in June 2018.
Kupferman said Cloud Daddy is investing in sales and marketing. It has a dozen employees and Kupferman is looking to hire another three to five, mostly in sales and marketing, by the end of the year.