The 5th VeeamON event held in Miami Beach recently, attracted around 2,000 customers and partners. The 2-day conference is the annual Veeam gathering of mainly IT admins to learn about and get certification for Veeam’s latest product releases. Veeam Co-Founder and EVP, Sales and Marketing, Ratmir Timashev provided Veeam’s update on business affairs and strategy.

Business Updates

What Timashev describes as Veeam’s ‘Act I’ has seen them emerge as a leader in backup and availability solutions for virtual environments over the last 10 years. ‘Act I’ further helped Veeam reach the milestone of US$1 billion in sales – over the current 12 months period – which elevates Veeam into an exclusive club of only 34 software companies that have achieved this milestone (and very few privately owned software companies have achieved this globally). Going forward, Veeam will continue to focus on their Hybrid Cloud strategy and what they describe as ‘Act II’ of their growth journey.

In line with the market moving from on-premises to cloud to hybrid environments, the next phase of growth will focus on adding hybrid cloud functionality to their existing hypervisor- and physical agent-centred software portfolio. By continuing their strategy on partnering and channels, the solutions are designed to make it easy for service providers to deliver Veeam as managed services to the market.

Ecosystm Comment. Ecosystm’s ongoing Cloud research shows that almost 100% of companies have shifted at least one workload onto the cloud which makes cloud undoubtedly mainstream. Despite that broad adoption we see cloud maturity still at an early stage as the number of SaaS workloads and the complexity of on-premises and cloud integration will increase over time. Our research shows that companies currently use an average of 3 separate SaaS applications which is expected to double over the next 12 months.

Stages of Cloud Management

Organisations’ requirements to manage their data assets in the hybrid world will mature in tandem with their expanded cloud footprint. Veeam describes this path as the ‘5 Stages of Cloud Management’.

Figure 1: Veeam’s Stages of Cloud Management

Veeam sees the majority of the market currently sitting at stage 1 or 2 providing a strong pipeline and growth path in taking customers along their ‘Act II’ journey.

Ecosystm Comment. We would raise some caution as the execution of this strategy may play out as more challenging than anticipated. Our research shows that a majority of companies – especially in emerging markets – see cloud as a means to shift the responsibility of data protection and availability, onto their cloud providers. The ongoing global Ecosystm Cybersecurity research reveals that nearly half the organisations rely solely on their public cloud provider to secure even their most sensitive data.

Figure 2: Perception on Public Cloud Security

This finding is concerning when competitiveness has increasingly moved away from the traditional measures such as cost, quality and time to a company’s data and IP assets. So Veeam is urged to equip their partners and sales team with a strong educational message that the responsibility of data protection and availability cannot be shifted solely onto the cloud provider. The responsibility and accountability remains with the organisation and has to be managed across the increasingly hybrid environments.

Product Announcements

Keeping with the tradition, Veeam leveraged VeeamON 2019 as the platform for a number of product releases and announcements. In alignment with the business strategy, most of the new features support data management in hybrid cloud environments as well as new integrations and features for SaaS and Cloud platforms.

The most anticipated release of version 10 of Veeam’s flagship Availability Suite has not yet happened. Announced at VeeamON 2017, Version 10 will be released towards the second half of 2019. While the delay may be of concern, we would give Veeam credit for adopting a true SaaS model for their product development process. They have constantly released newer features and functionality to the current suite, opting to release some features faster to market to answer to specific customer demands at the time, such as centralised agent management support and Universal Storage API support. The key new features of Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 include easy management of cloud migration and cloud mobility, cloud-native backup, cost-effective data retention, and portable cloud-ready licensing, increased security and data governance.

Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2 is the second generation of Veeam’s DR orchestration platform reducing the manual processes to achieve auditable DR, operational recovery and platform migrations. With increasing industry regulations this capability could give organisations of all sizes and resources the tools to prove and proactively remediate service level agreement (SLA) attainment for internal and external compliance regulations and audits with extensive reporting and compliance capabilities.

Nutanix Mine with Veeam is another product which received a lot of interest at VeeamON. With availability announced for late 2019, Mine is a partnership with Nutanix to provide more comprehensive and affordable solutions for secondary storage layers. Similar joint offerings have also been announced with ExaGrid. Mine provides Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure with highly integrated Veeam Backup & Replication solutions to provide easy deployment and scaling, faster time to value and standardised IT operations management.

Ecosystm Comment. Ecosystm’s research shows that regulatory requirements are key to organisations’ propensity to invest in data protection and availability solutions. They are often built into the organisations’ risk management programmes as well.

Figure 3: Drivers of Continued Focus on Cybersecurity

Availability Orchestrator v2 presents a strong entry point for Veeam to start the discussions for a more holistic data management solution. Providing the automation of the DR orchestration, scenario planning and auditable DR documentation strengthens Veeam’s claim to be the rightful owner of the Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) discussion. Furthermore, although it may be from leftfield, Ecosystm sees a great opportunity for some partnerships with Cybersecurity insurance companies to make Veeam Availability Orchestrator an accepted standard for Cybersecurity premium assessments and rebates. Ecosystm has seen a rapid rise of Cybersecurity insurance adoption with nearly 50% of global organisations already signed on to different policies. With adoption expected to accelerate over the coming years, Cybersecurity insurers could present a new route to market that is not in competition to its existing network of more than 60,000 partners.

Looking Ahead

Veeam has announced ‘Act II’ as the second stage of growth to carry on from their initial virtual machine-centred availability solution. The strategy follows the natural evolution and path of the market and will not require a major rethink or restructure of the Veeam business.

What is changing is the scale of business in geographical coverage, product portfolio and most importantly the Veeam partner ecosystem. In the same way that Veeam expanded their breadth in ‘Act I’ from the original VMware hypervisor backup to the broader hypervisor market and core infrastructure integrations, ‘Act II’ will require expansion across the key cloud platforms, exponentially growing SaaS landscape and the different tiered infrastructure providers.

Veeam’s product development teams have been one of the main beneficiaries of Veeam’s $500 million fund raising exercise earlier in 2019 (investors include Insight Venture Partners & Canada Pension Plan Investment Board) as they invested further in organic internal development instead of acquiring and integrating third party capabilities.

Geographical expansion is another area where the $500 million has been invested in. Veeam currently sits at 350,000 customers with 4,000 being added on a monthly basis. Emerging markets such as Asia Pacific are the engines of the growth but there are still markets and partnerships to be explored and developed. Across Asia Pacific alone Veeam opened 4 new offices in the first 5 months of 2019 and further expansions are planned for the months to come. The race for scale is essential to execute on ‘Act II’ but it brings operational challenges to scale in tandem with their operations while maintaining the culture that made Veeam what they are.

Ecosystm Comment. There is no doubt that there is a lot of work ahead of Veeam in executing on ‘Act II’. We have seen early proof that execution is following strategy, with new partnerships in the tiered storage space (such as Nutanix and ExaGrid), new products focussed across mainstream SaaS applications such as Office365 and tighter cloud integrations with Azure and AWS. There is currently lesser compatibility with Alibaba Cloud and no integration with Google which would be essential to accelerate their growth especially in Asia Pacific which has been highlighted as Veeam’s growth engine. The SaaS landscape presents an even tougher challenge for Veeam. Veeam Backup for Office365 has demonstrated the strong opportunity of workload-based availability solutions but developing the same capability across hundreds or thousands of diverse SaaS applications will present challenges. At the same time, we agree with Veeam’s focus on going deep into their solutions integration with the key partners and workloads that present the greatest opportunity today rather than spreading resources to put breadth over depths at this stage.

In 2013 Ratmir Timashev predicted to reach $1 billion within 6 years which was achieved just in time for VeeamON 2019. There were no new predictions made for ‘Act II’ but we see Veeam on the right path to announce tangible progress on their ‘Act II’ execution at VeeamON 2020 in Las Vegas.