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A look back at the IT Press Tour: What we presented—and what we were challenged on

On September 1 and 2, 2026, Cybee was in Ljubljana for the 69th edition of the IT Press Tour, in front of thirteen European IT journalists. Here’s what we said, what the press took away from it, and the questions we still don’t have good answers to.
IT Press Tour 2026

A format that leaves little room for political doublespeak

The IT Press Tour has existed since 2010. The concept is simple: a handful of vendors present their solutions to a select group of European trade journalists in a closed-door session lasting an hour and a half. No exhibition booths, no plenary sessions, and no press releases distributed at the end of the session. Just a continuous stream of questions from people who have seen hundreds of backup solutions before yours.

For this 69th edition, organized by Philippe Nicolas in Ljubljana, Cybee was presented alongside DataCore, HYCU, Stratofoundry, Veridion, and VulX. We were one of the newest products on the list: Cybee has been in production since March 2026.
It’s a useful exercise precisely because it’s uncomfortable. We come away with confirmed insights and a list of weaknesses identified by third parties. Both are of interest to us.

Eric Deronzier IT Press Tour

The starting point: no one has ever provided tools to support the rollout of a backup solution

We began with a simple insight.

When a company wants to switch from VMware to Proxmox, migration tools exist. They are well-documented, proven, and sometimes provided by the competitor you’re switching to. When that same company wants to switch backup solutions, it discovers that it has ten years’ worth of regulatory retention data locked away in a proprietary format—unreadable without the software that created it.

A bank cannot abandon these archives. Neither can a healthcare facility. The result is a lock-in that has no technical basis: it is based solely on a file format.

This observation is at the heart of Cybee, and it is no longer merely technical. The DORA regulation requires financial institutions to demonstrate their ability to switch providers. NIS2 requires affected entities to demonstrate regular restoration tests. In the European RFP’s we’re seeing, open formats are no longer just an architect’s preference—they’ve become a contractual requirement.

What we have shown

Three architectural options—which are also the only three factors our clients can verify without having to take our word for it.

An open repository format
  • Cybee is built on Restic, an open-source backup engine. Restic handles file management, integrity checks, and cleanup.
  • We built everything else: a single agent in Rust for Windows and Linux, Windows disk image backups via VSS, multi-server orchestration, and the console. The repository format remains that of Restic: public and well-documented.
  • In practical terms, if Cybee were to disappear tomorrow, your backups would still be readable using the Restic binary.
European S3 storage, without transit through our platform
  • The data is sent, deduplicated and encrypted, directly from the server to a European S3 storage service—currently T Cloud Public by T-Systems—in the Netherlands.
  • Our control plan orchestrates, schedules, and monitors; it does not process the data, which goes directly from the client servers to the cloud.
  • This is not a marketing pitch about data sovereignty; it is a data flow diagram that an architect can audit.
A recovery rate measured in terabytes per hour
  • Up to 4 TB/h per disk on the fastest storage classes.
  • These figures aren’t from a lab—they come from the production environment at Nuabee, our sister company, which has been operating DRaaS for twelve years and is now Cybee’s largest user.
  • That represents approximately 150 companies, 2,500 critical VMs, and three petabytes of data.

The contrast between what we embrace and what we reject

We’re not the only ones building on an open platform. Zmanda, in the United States, also relies on Restic. Plakar in France is working in the same space. We mentioned this during the session rather than waiting for someone to point it out to us.

The real contrast lies elsewhere, with the solutions we encounter every day in the field: Veeam, Commvault, Acronis, … They were born in the LAN era, and that’s evident in the cloud. They perform very effective on-premises deduplication, then store an undeduplicated replica in the cloud—often on the most expensive storage tier of the three offered by any provider. In the event of a disaster involving several terabytes, they restore too slowly.

However, we’re not trying to replace them, and that’s probably the most misunderstood aspect of our positioning. About 80% of our new customers run a local backup solution, and we don’t ask them to stop using it. Cybee acts as an additional layer of resilience, with a guaranteed output format. Some customers abandon their local backup after one to three years; others will never abandon it. Both scenarios are fine with us.

This is the interpretation ITdaily adopted when it ran a headline about a “European way out” for Veeam customers. We’re happy to echo that.

Questions to which we don’t yet have good answers

A report that ended here would be of no interest. Four criticisms were directed at us, all of them valid.

“You preach openness, but Cybee isn’t open source.” The distinction is real: our storage format is open, but our orchestration is not. It is this format that guarantees your reversibility, and it is what matters to a CIO. But the objection remains valid, and the response we gave during the session—promising partial openness within two to four years—was deemed insufficient. We’re a small team, and opening up the code requires a governance structure that we haven’t yet established. We’d rather say that than announce a date we wouldn’t be able to meet.

“You have only one customer, and that’s your sister company.” That’s correct; Nuabee is currently Cybee’s leading distributor. We consider that three petabytes and 2,500 critical VMs in production constitute a more demanding environment than ten pilot customers, but this does not replace the diversity of a true customer base. Opening up to the MSP channel is the milestone that matters to us.

“The console is only available in French.” That’s currently the case, and the English demo was run through a machine translation tool. It’s indeed difficult to project a European image with a monolingual interface: this is our top priority before opening up the channel.

“No hypervisors, no databases.” Cybee operates via agents and currently and deliberately does not support VMware or Hyper-V hypervisors. This is a choice to remain independent of the virtualization layer—useful when a customer migrates—but it’s also a limitation for those who want to back up at the hypervisor level today. For this need, we’re not the right tool, and we’re upfront about it.

What We’ve Learned

Three lessons, in the order of their usefulness to us.

  1. The first: the nature of the open format has changed. Three years ago, it was an engineer’s argument. It has become a bidding criterion, driven by regulation rather than technology.
  2. The second: our message must be as verifiable as our architecture. Our two real differentiators are those a customer can verify without taking our word for it—we’re European, and our format is open. Everything else is demonstrated in production.
  3. The third, and most uncomfortable: at this stage, Cybee is a way out alongside existing solutions, not a destination. That’s the press’s conclusion, but it’s also ours as of today. What happens in 2027—with the opening of the channel, the internationalization of the console, and database support—will determine the rest.

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