All the three co-founders of Druvaa, Ramani Kothandaraman, Milind Borate and Jaspreet Singh, had a plum job at Veritas before, which earned them bomb. But a dream of building their own company kept on haunting them constantly. The reason they give for their plunge into entrepreneurship is, "If Indians can build great products for foreign companies in India then why can't an Indian company build as great a product in India for an Indian company?"

Today, they have accomplished their dream by founding Druvaa, a provider of software products that will help big companies protect their crucial data against any disaster. With over 100 enterprises across the globe using its products, Druvaa believes that one doesn't need a huge team to build a world-class product; only a few technology enthusiasts can do it.

HEADQUARTERS: Pune, India

PRODUCTS: Druvaa Replicator—It is a real time data replication and protection product. It can replicate data from production servers to secondary servers and during production server failures it ensures business continuity.

Druvaa inSync— This enterprise data backup solution uses advanced data de-duplication technology to backup data duplicate between users only once. On restore the user sees a timeline view of data and can restore from any point in the past.

CO-FOUNDERS:
President and CEO—Ramani Kothandaraman
CTO and VP Engineering—Milind Borate
VP Business Development—Jaspreet Singh

Ramani Kothandaraman has more than 18 years of experience of which he has 13 in management and delivery positions including Symantec, Veritas, IBM, LogicaCMG and TCS. Ramani was Assistant Director in the Cabinet Secretariat for five years and a Research Scientist with Department of Space for two years.

Milind Borate has over 13 years experience in enterprise product development and delivery. He has filed over 15 patent applications and co-authored “Undocumented Windows NT” in 1998.

Jaspreet has four years of experience in enterprise product development and delivery.He worked for Veritas and Ensim Corp. as software developer.

BUSINESS MODEL: The Company earns by selling their products through licensing model.

DIFFERENTIATOR: Proliferation and preservation of many versions and copies of data also contributes to the tremendous data growth most companies are experiencing. With increasing complexities in the enterprise environment, there is a need for newer technologies that can help simplify, as well as improve the enterprise data consolidation, protection and availability processes.

Normally, about 80 percent of the data in any enterprise has similar content. Druvaa inSync’s (patent pending) SendUnique feature (which uses Single Instance File System on the backup server, to compare the file fingerprints to the existing files in the server to check whether it’s a unique data) identifies this at the user end and ensures that only one copy is sent to be backed up. This enables customer to make best use of bandwidth and consumes very little storage space. Founders claim that Druvaa inSync offers upto 10 times faster enterprise PC backup with 90 percent reduction in bandwidth and storage utilization. This is the key differentiating factor and since the product line from Druvaa offers features that are not available with any competitor, the company charges a little extra for their products.

COMPETITORS:Veritas, IBM

HEADCOUNT: 18

CUSTOMERS: First Reserve Inc, Reliance, Indian Oil, Cordys, and Covalence

QUEUED UP: Scale inSync product to enterprise PDAs and Servers.

TIME LINE:
2007 Dec – Introduced Druvaa inSync product line
2008 Jan – Got funded by IAN, Accord-HK
2008 Feb – Filed patents around data de-duplication at source
2008 June – Signed 2 Fortune 500 companies as customers
2008 July – Won Indian Entrepreneurial Challenge

WEBSITE: www.druvaa.com