VeeamON used to have 2000 attendees. That was in the “old” world from a few months ago. The “new normal” has made the company pivot its popular event to digital, as is happening around the industry, with more or less success and execution prowess.
Veeam nailed it.
One interesting thing happened: it “democratized” the event, making it available to 20 times more people than the physical event could. So out of a “bad” thing, a good thing happened. Veeam will also hold localized versions of this in various parts of the world in the next few weeks, like Europe. However, it was pretty clear that many did not want to wait and joined the event despite the time difference.
Let’s talk numbers:
- 27K registered for the June 17/18 event
- 12K+ partners
- Peak attendance yesterday (June 17): 8.6K
- 6 EMEA forums over the next two weeks (1/2 day virtual events in local language): 11.4K+, but still adding to it
- The Miami event last year had 2000 or so participants (including Veeam employees)
There is still room for improvement in terms of format, length of certain sessions, and some technical difficulties here and there, but overall Veeam benefited from experience and past shortcomings to deliver a solid digital event in only a matter of weeks.
The mix of pre-recorded and live sessions and the plethora of options is going to turn into a vast on-demand catalog for partners, customers, and prospects. And I expect competitors, too – which takes us to the product piece.
Veeam is very credibly executing on key aspects of its products strategy to take it further into the enterprise space as many organizations are in the process of accelerating their digital transformation and their reliance on multi-cloud environments. One could have worried about Veeam becoming a bunch of pieces band-aided together, but that’s not what’s happening. As a matter of fact, we at ESG are impressed with the integration of cloud capabilities.
Overall, Veeam is in a battle for the enterprise. They are taking on multiple fronts in what has become an intense competitive battlefield in the space of data protection – a space which has never been more dynamic!
On the topic of broadening the business use cases for the platform, there were mentions of data reuse on multiple occasions, and we believe that the core components are in place in the architecture, but we’re not there yet. We expect to see a lot more in terms of intelligent data management moving forward.
On the technology side, the big deal these days is containers, Kubernetes, etc. The partnership with Kasten around containers is also a good first step to address the many challenges associated with protecting containerized applications and data, but here again, competition is significantly intensifying. Will it be enough? Time will tell.
Two areas to keep an eye on: APIs and AI/ML. We expect to see more on this front, and some of the capabilities exist today. For the enterprise battle, it will be key to “reveal” some of these best kept secrets, and amp up their marketing.
Let’s break things down:
Veeam Backup for Office 365 v5
Veeam has been building its capabilities up for a while on this platform. The recent addition of Teams backup and the improved authentication capabilities are timely in the current situation (which was clearly unforeseen). This will help organizations reinforce their compliance posture, and preserve important information, IP, and data that is exchanged on this collaboration platform.
Veeam Backup for AWS v2
Our research on cloud and cloud backup and recovery makes it clear that protecting applications and data wherever they are hosted is a key business and IT mandate. End-users need a hybrid solution that truly supports cloud-based workloads. We believe that Veeam’s focused execution on the topic of cloud in general, and with AWS in particular is going to pay off as the company leverages its partner ecosystem to provide a broader set of solutions to their customers.
Veeam Availability Orchestrator v3
Orchestration is the heart of successful BC/DR workflows and results. On this front, Veeam is executing on their roadmap. These capabilities in general, combined with automation, have the potential in time to be highly differentiating as they form the basis for other workflows that support intelligent data management and data re-use.
Veeam Availability Suite V11
The big news here is the availability of CDP – which changes the game in terms of RPO and RTO. This was needed to raise Veeam’s competitive posture in the enterprise space and further its ability to support mission-critical workloads. This capability offers strong potential immediately to all users, and is another feature that will become key in acquiring new customers, or upselling and displacing competitors in large multi-vendor accounts where Veeam is already present.
In conclusion, this VeeamON and its announcements is helping customers connect the dots between their solutions and how get from a to b. It will become increasingly necessary for Veeam to continue and intensify this type of access to training and to provide extended roadmap visibility, a key to success for the enterprise space, and generally across all segments. And yes, we all missed the open bar but were probably more attentive!
