Welcome to Hunger Games 2026 Edition! Each decade, there are new Data Protection problems that are often first addressed by startups. Established vendors face the build-or-buy (or partner) choices of grabbing from the cornucopia or developing their own.
20yrs ago, Virtualization: Veeam, PHD Virtual, vRanger
10yrs ago, SaaS-Backup: Spanning & Backupify (both now Kaseya)
Today, Cloud Infra Recovery: Firefly.ai, Arpio, Commvault, Cohesity, Rubrik
May the odds be ever in your favor.
video transcript
Welcome to Hunger Games 2026! One of my favorite scenes in that first movie was the 24 combatants first being elevated onto the battlegrounds. You can see their wheels turning as each considers running into the cornucopia to grab an existing weapon or running into the forest to build their own.
At least once a decade, there’s a critically unique aspect of data protection that has to be solved; often first by startups. Each established data protection vendor faces that ‘build-or-buy’ question: embracing through acquisition or partnering, or building it within their own tech stack. There are advantages to both approaches.
20 years ago, Virtualization was the challenge. Veeam (happy 20th birthday) along with PhD Virtual and vRanger were in the cornucopia. Two of them got bought for their IP and one is now a market leader, but virtualization is now table-stakes across every major data protection vendor and provider. That said, there’s still opportunities for differentiation, mostly based on breadth and agility.
10 years ago, SaaS Backup was the challenge, back when many didn’t believe you had to back up SaaS. That’s the first time I wrote about Hunger Games, where Spanning and Backupify were in the cornucopia. And while both of those technologies have been acquired and nearly every backup solution now has an M365 answer, there is still differentiation among mainstream approaches: not just for M365, but for other SaaS’es that matter, as well as other Microsoft cloud services that require protection; including Entra ID.
The analogy isn’t perfect between weapons and players. In my SaaS blog, I described those startups as a sword and a bow. Their methods were different … they appealed to different combatants and different buyers … and their underlying mechanisms influenced how the industry would eventually evolve.
Today, Recovery of Cloud Infrastructure is the next battleground. The challenge here isn’t just “Can I recover a cloud VM, file share, or database?” but “Can I discover all the components that have to be recovered or stitched together before data restoration can even begin?” In the cornucopia are Arpio and Firefly.AI. Appranix was in the cornucopia, until Commvault bought them; meanwhile, Cohesity and Rubrik have announced their own solutions.
We’re not quite halfway into the latest movie. Some contestants grabbed a weapon quickly, some acted on their own plans, and some are seeking partnerships. So far: two builds and one buy; again, with very different approaches to the problem and some interesting standalone moves from the startups themselves. Meanwhile, some haven’t revealed their hands yet, so it’s still early game — and definitely worth watching how it unfolds.
Leave your thoughts on the LinkedIn article.
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