Innovating with Purpose: Building Clumio’s Hub

At a very high level, for any startup like Clumio to be successful, two things must matter most. First, have you read the market right? Second, do you have what it takes to market your idea?

It is not an easy job, but a successful launch from stealth and winning the Best of Show award at VMworld just a couple of weeks later increased our faith that we have not only read the market right, but have also disrupted it by making it delightfully easy for our customers to back up their enterprise data.

We need to answer the next question: Do we have what it takes to take the product idea to market? And I am, at this point, going to shift my focus towards purely engineering though there are several other equally important aspects needed to carry the idea to market. The reason being, if you can’t build it, you can’t sell it.

Unlike other companies trying to come to India later in their company life cycle primarily to reduce costs, Clumio took a different approach. We decided to open the Clumio Research and Development Center in Bengaluru as an innovation hub, recognizing that India has great potential and a strong talent pool. If tapped into correctly, this combination can be beneficial to its charter of building a world-class business based on sound engineering practices. Based on that faith, Clumio started an investment in India much earlier than normal and with the charter to lead its own set of innovative contributions to the Clumio service.

Entire suites of products, which are critical to the medium and long term strategy of Clumio, have already been built and delivered out of the India research and development center, end to end. Examples include REST API Platform, Enterprise SSO and MFA, UI framework, and several key features. Very recently, we launched a Microsoft 365 Backup and Recovery Service.

Any organization’s primary objective must be one, singular, and it must be nothing other than to build a great business. Not good, but great. To achieve the aim of creating a great company, Clumio has invested in building a great workplace. At Clumio India you will find that trust underpins and affects the quality of every relationship, communication, and project. TRUST is the cornerstone of our core values, and we maintain it at an extremely high premium between our team members. The foundational stones of TRUST have been set with a strong commitment from our CEO and senior management and is reflected throughout the company. One of those stones is transparency so we empower our employees and we emphasize autonomy. Everyone has visibility into all critical decisions, and everyone has a voice. Lastly, but not less importantly, we have an honest and indispensable belief that “we are not like the others.”

Towards that end, we strive to build our team with brilliant people. We have judiciously applied and maintained a high level of consistency in balancing experience levels across all groups. We value potential and attitude, and know that skills can be developed. We know that with our bold vision and the significant role of our research and development center in bringing that vision to life, of the utmost importance is bringing a startup hustle and transparency to the team every day. By recognizing that we have everyone’s best interests in mind, and, by striving for continuous improvements, we only raise the bar for ourselves.

I will end with this thought. If you are looking for a career in an enterprise B2B company in 2020, you want to join a company that’s building natively in the public cloud and delivering a service to the end customer. You want to come to a company where there are difficult technology problems to solve that only get harder over time, which happens in a SaaS company as the platform has to scale as more customers use it. You want to come to a company where you are going to learn from really smart people and one that has an environment that gives you an opportunity to do the best work and have the best years of your professional life. And lastly, you want to come to a company that is run very transparently, so that you get an opportunity to expand your horizons, and not just learn technology, but also the business of technology. In the India R&D enterprise B2B space, you are going to be hard-pressed to find a company better than Clumio for all of the above. You get to learn the fundamentals and the depths of cloud native architecture, build loosely coupled microservices, and work with the smartest of engineers to build a distributed system that scales beautifully to disrupt a massive enterprise backup market. When you become part of Clumio India, you can catapult your career in the cloud – the computing era of the future. And I am proud to be playing my part of leading Clumio India R&D.