Veeam Urges Partners To Go 'All In'

Veeam Software executives urged partners to go "all in" with the backup and availability specialist as the company focuses on a dramatically expanded portfolio of solutions from on-premises agents to public cloud this week at its VeeamOn 2018 conference in Chicago.

"Customers are making the decision to move on from their legacy backup products," said Kevin Rooney, vice president of Americas Partner Sales, in a keynote for the partner general session on Monday. Rooney said the key opportunity is from now through the next 12 to 18 months for Veeam's 55,000 partners, who account for 100 percent of Veeam sales.

Rooney said it's important to understand where those customers are in terms of their legacy providers. "They're looking for the top end of the technology," Rooney said.

At VeeamOn, the company is rolling out a new branding to reach a larger total addressable market. The company is moving from its recent tagline of "availability for the always-on enterprise" to "intelligent data management for the hyper-available enterprise."

Co-CEO and President Peter McKay walked partners through a simplified Veeam history in his keynote, saying the company was about virtual machine backup from its founding in 2006, recovery in 2010, availability last year, and hyper-availability now. He defined hyper-availability as the need to protect and make available data that is critical to the business, growing exponentially and sprawling across locations that include physical datacenters, virtual datacenters, public clouds and SaaS applications.

Ratmir Timashev, Veeam's co-founder and senior vice president for marketing and corporate development, said the current battle in the industry is to dominate the multi-cloud, that portion of the sprawling infrastructure that includes providing availability for services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. Timashev said the company's acquisition earlier this year of N2WS, an AWS backup and recovery specialist, was a key component of that strategy, and McKay said the company would rely on a mix of of internal development and acquisitions to add coverage of additional cloud platforms and SaaS applications.

Rooney encouraged partners to take advantage of the new cloud and physical workload opportunities within Veeam's platform. "One of the knocks against the Veeam for a while [from competitors] was, 'Hey, they're virtual-only.' That's off the table. The agents we should be selling across the board," Rooney said in reference to new agents for IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris operating systems that Veeam unveiled last November.

Rooney also pointed partners to Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. "A lot of customers don't realize that Office 365 is not inherently backed up," Rooney said.

During a media breakfast on Tuesday morning, Vice President of Product Strategy Danny Allan detailed Veeam's momentum around the Office 365 product.

"There are 29,000 organizations using backup for Office 365 today. That represents 2.7 million mailboxes," he said. The 1.0 version released last year protected mailboxes. A version 1.5 added multi-tenant capabilities aimed at Veeam Cloud & Service Providers (VCSPs). The company released a beta last week for a 2.0 version with support for OneDrive and SharePoint. That version is targeted for general availability in the second quarter, Allan said.

Those sales are part of a broader growth story for Veeam. Last month, Veeam announced that the first quarter of 2018 was its 39th straight quarter of record bookings growth. The company claimed 21 percent growth year-over-year and said it was on track to become a $1 billion company (by revenues) in 2018. In a graphic shown to partners earlier in the day, Veeam told partners it was a $200 million company in 2012, was on track to hit $1.1 billion in 2018, and was aiming for $1.5 billion in 2020.

Senior executives assured partners that Veeam was in it for the long haul with a 10-year planning horizon and wasn't looking to sell the company or go public.

"What are the reasons for us to sell? We are fast-growing, we have a great market. There is not a single reason. And we don't have venture capitalists. They don't need the exits, they are not pushing us for the exits," Timashev said.

Posted by Scott Bekker on May 15, 2018