The exterior of the Bioscience and Technology Business Center on Kansas University’s West Campus is seen in this file photo from 2013.

An emerging Silicon Valley tech company plans to hire about 20 engineers for its new operations center on KU’s West Campus.

Rubrik, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that specializes in managing data for cloud computing users, has plans to open The Rubrik Center for Excellence in the technology incubator building — the Bioscience and Technology Business Center — on KU’s West Campus.

In talking with an official from Rubrik, it sounds like the center will play a key role in providing customer support for the company’s clients. But in a twist, the company is going to use actual engineers to provide that customer support rather than people who may have a lesser understanding of the technology.

“We don’t want customers to get the basic support services of asking whether everything is plugged in, ‘have you restarted your computer,’ that sort of thing,” Gerry Garwood, regional sales manager for Kansas and Missouri told me. “We feel like customer support is an area of tremendous deficiency in the IT world right now.”

It is an interesting idea. My father-in-law is an engineer, but I’m not sure I see him in a customer support role. Every time I ask for advice, he just mumbles something about a time machine to take him back to the day I married his daughter.

But I also sense that the company plans to do more than just customer support at the center. In the press release announcing the creation of the center, Garwood said the hope is the center becomes a larger hub for research.

“Inspired by the Research Triangle in North Carolina, we expect the Rubrik Center for Excellence adjacent to the University of Kansas in Lawrence to become a hub for research, innovation and training in the Midwest.”

As for why Lawrence and KU was chosen for the center, Garwood said some of the company’s first clients actually were in the Kansas City area. That led company founders to become familiar with the area, which put KU on their radar screen when they came up with the idea of having a center that was located on a university campus.

Whatever the reason, Rubrik now is a company local economic development leaders will want to keep an eye on. The company has only been in business for about three years, but it has generated significant interest in the Silicon Valley tech world. According to an April article in Bloomberg, the company recently raised $180 million in venture capital funding, which now puts the total value of the company at $1.3 billion.

According to the article, the company had about 330 employees at the time, and was adding about 70 to 80 employees per quarter. The company also was adding about 75 to 85 new customers per quarter, according to Bloomberg.

You may be wondering, though, what is it that the company actually does. Well, it is data management. I’ll explain, but you should know that I have an email inbox that proves data management is not my strong suit. (It also proves that if robots ever take over the world, they’ll do so while us humans are checking the 25,000 emails they’ve sent us about the one food you should never eat if you want a flat belly.)

But based on what I’ve read about the company, it has created a software product that allows for the easy backup, security, recovery and management of data. Importantly, the software program works for both data that is stored on a server that is on-site or for data that is stored off-site as part of cloud servers hosted by Amazon, Microsoft or others. That seems to be a key selling point for the company, which says it is approaching $100 million in annualized bookings.

The company hopes to hire the engineers by the end of 2017. Garwood said the workforce likely would be a mix of new engineering graduates and some more experienced engineers. Garwood is supposed to be getting me more information about expected pay ranges for the new positions. I’ll let you know what I hear.

I believe officials at the Bioscience and Technology Business Center — which is a partnership between, KU, the city, the county, the chamber and others — are pretty excited about the new tenant. GR Underwood, president of the BTBC, said in a statement that Rubrik can be a centerpiece to a much larger vision of uniting “private industry, academia, local researchers, and entrepreneurs” on the KU campus.

I’ve got a call into Underwood to find out a bit more and to get a general update on the BTBC. I’ll let you know when I hear more.

I do have one other piece of BTBC news. Two companies that are based at the BTBC recently won top awards at an international agriculture biotech event.

PrairieChar and Integrated Animal Health took first and second-place awards respectively in the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s 2017 Ag Biotech Entrepreneurial Showcase.

PrairieChar won first-place and a $10,000 cash prize as part of the event, which featured about 500 businesses competing for the top prize. PrairieChar is developing a technology that deconstructs animal manure and turns it into useful products. One product is fertilizer, while another is as a fuel source. PrairieChar is touting it is a cleaner burring fuel alternative to coal. The award is expected to give the company a boost beyond just the $10,000 cash prize.

“The North Carolina International Ag Biotech Showcase turned out to be a much bigger deal for PrairieChar than expected, and we were humbled to win first place,” CEO Robert Herrington said in a statement.

Integrated Animal Health was one of the other 12 finalist chosen to compete for the top prize. It received a runner-up award. Integrated Animal Health is a firm we’ve reported on before. In April 2015 the Australian firm announced it was moving its headquarters to Lawrence. The company has a product that reduces antibiotic use in dairy herds, and also conducts research related to foods, medicines and other products for livestock, pets and even wildlife.