I am at VeeamON 2022 in Las Vegas this week attending the event in person. I had the great opportunity to spend time with a few key executives from Veeam and discuss their latest release and plans for the future.
Veeam provided attendees with details, demonstrations and previews of their upcoming updates to what has become a very unified platform. Veeam’s strategy is to “protect all data across all environments.” This means multi-cloud and hybrid topologies, cloud, SaaS, and Kubernetes. The announcements are expected to ship in the second half of the year.
The Veeam platform is essentially getting broader and deeper, and I am seeing a more pronounced focus on (intelligent) data management and a timely and strong focus on cyber-resilience…and don’t be mistaken: this is how the company is charting its path towards further enterprise market share in the future.
Veeam’s strategy is to integrate at the data source or service where to minimize or eliminate agents. This helps in many ways, including deployment, performance, and security.
In the cloud space, this means leveraging APIs in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and SaaS offerings (Microsoft 365 and wait for it….Salesforce!). One additional and notable effort in this version was to also deliver the integration (at least a start) of Kasten K10 for Kubernetes.
In summary:
Cloud acceleration: new features including direct writes to object storage and cloud-based agents and enhanced Microsoft 365 capabilities and Salesforce support.
Cyber resilience: Immutability everywhere for fast ransomware recovery and protection from cyberthreats
Enterprise scale: Additional enterprise application support and centralized visibility and management of Kubernetes data protection with the new Veeam Backup & Replication plug-in for the new Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.0.
Veeam has been on a path to increase their presence in the enterprise for a while now, and in my view this is the way to do it: deliver a platform that is as complete as possible and can handle scale. It has paid off so far: 25% YoY ARR growth, the subscription business is up 78% and the company is now inching close to half a million customers – drop mic.
The company also has a healthy Backup as a Service presence though its managed services partners – 10, 000 providers around the world. Net net: Veeam’s success is not slowing down. If anything, it is accelerating.
Additionally, Veeam has built a very healthy set of partners in its ecosystem offering and is actively going to market with them. This “triangulation” of the market (platform, partners, channel) combined with marketing investments is working.
This being said, to maintain this level of success and continue its stratospheric rise, it is going to take focused execution and relentless innovation in the following areas:
- Add new enterprise mission-critical SaaS platforms. There’s a significant disconnect in the market: your data, your responsibility. Don’t think the SaaS vendor will do the backups for you. With most organizations having most of their data and “workloads” in the public cloud or in SaaS, it’s about protecting these business-critical services and applications. How many SaaS apps do you have in your business? Just think about it…This is an underserved market overall. While it may be tempting to wait and see which SaaS users understand the need for data protection and are now ready to buy, in my opinion we are about to see a bit of an arms race for which data protection/management vendor can get coverage for most of the main ones. First mover advantage still counts…
- Develop/partner or acquire further at-scale capabilities to optimize data re-use. This means data classification, indexing, security etc. Veeam has the foundational architecture to further connect to the data persona and business/functional data consumers.
- Double down on cyber-resilience integrations, features and ecosystem partnerships. Our recent and about to be published cyber-resilience research shows that recoverability is the most exposed dimension in the fight against ransomware. It has changed the face of traditional disaster recovery. Stay tuned on this topic, more to come from ESG very soon!
Veeam has done exceptionally well and with this new release, the company is continuing to build on what seems like an unstoppable momentum as they are revving up their V12 engine!
