Data Protection and Data Management Vendor Review of Veeam: Customer-Focused, Future Forward, Feet on the Ground

Last week I attended VeeamON 2019, in Miami, and I had the chance to get a better idea about the status of Veeam and where it is headed. Veeam describes their services as providing “data protection for any app, any data across any cloud,” and I am positively impressed not only by the company and its management but also by the fact that end users, vendors, and partners love working with them. Technology partners and resellers appear highly satisfied with their business relations with this software vendor, while end users love the product and the support they get for their everyday needs.
Beyond Numbers
$1Bn in revenues and 350K customers, with what looks like an unstoppable Y/Y growth. This is Veeam. And this also means that Veeam is gaining market share when compared to all its direct competitors.
A formidable achievement, although I don’t think revenues and growth say enough about the solidity and maturity of this company. In fact, such results can be seen as more like the natural consequences of the lucidity of its management and R&D teams. Veeam knows how to listen to its customers and provide solutions that meet client needs in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and budget.
Most Veeam customers are in the SME segment, but they are doing quite well with large enterprises too and the work done to develop specific solutions for service providers is paying off as well.
The Next Phase (Act 2)
Veeam is a data protection company aiming at becoming a data management company for the hybrid- and multi-cloud era. It’s not there yet, but I think there are several indications pointing towards a positive outcome to their goals.
First of all, they are delivering new capabilities for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack, IBM Cloud and thousands of SaaS providers. Some of these implementations are still immature, but very promising. At the same time, the data management part is still at an embryonic stage of development, but the potential is huge.
In this regard, Data Labs has been joined by Data Integrations, a tool that allows the reuse of data saved in the backups through APIs, enabling third-party developers and Veeam itself to crawl into a copy of the data and leverage its content for several use cases, including security, risk management, compliance and more.
With a base of 350,000 customers, if Veeam is able to build simple and easy-to-use applications for data management on top of its data protection suite, it will be very easy to increment sales on existing SMB customers while looking for new ones. At the same time, if the APIs remain open, the partners could concentrate their efforts in taking advantage of data exposed by Veeam for more complex solutions.
Closing the Circle
Albeit the bar is set very high now, Veeam has been doing great since the beginning and is now working to repeat its success in a second, more mature, phase. The exec team has a clear, straightforward vision with a sound strategy. The ingredients seem much the same as the first growing phase: flexibility, simplicity, and ease of use at the core with a lot of common sense when it comes to the execution, and I can’t see why they wouldn’t be able to build upon their initial success.
Photos from the event here.