Veeam made a number of important corporate, product and partner announcements during VeeamON, an availability event recently hosted by the company in New Orleans, which was attended by more than 3,000 participants.
Aimed at shaking up the market and sounding a clear warning bell to competitors, the first announcement was the realignment of Veeam’s executive roster by promoting Andrei Baronov and Peter McKay to Co-CEO roles. These executive changes add extra focus and strength to help the company continue its rapid expansion into the Enterprise and Cloud segments, and enable it to accelerate growth into the Americas and APJ markets. In his keynote address, Peter McKay reaffirmed the company’s goal of hitting the $1.5 billion revenue target in 2020.
As a 100 per cent channel-focused company, some key announcements were aimed at supporting partners in their quest to deliver seamless Digital Life experiences to users across the globe. One of the highlights for partners was the new Veeam Accredited Service Provider programme, which enables members to deliver high-quality professional services related to Veeam solutions and help customers realise increased reliability, along with greater value and RoI in Veeam to architect, deploy and manage Veeam solutions. The new programme offers a range of member benefits, including marketing promotion and visibility, increased technical services, demo and training aids and co-branding and marketing material.
Cloud computing is on the rise and, in this scenario, the demand for data availability and protection will no doubt increase exponentially. With Veeam born in the virtual world, it holds a distinct advantage over competition when it comes to helping customers move to and manage data in a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud environment. With new innovations across Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Availability Platform, the company has greatly expanded the total addressable market for its partners to manage and protect public cloud and physical workloads. The company has reiterated that it will not run its own cloud infrastructure, but rather allow partners to build and run their own clouds for end-customers. The idea is to deliver ‘to the cloud, from the cloud and within the cloud’ business availability opportunities for all partners, instead of competing with them.
In order to help customers and partners find a cloud and service provider in their area, which offers hosted services using Veeam products, the company announced the launch of a new Cloud and Service Provider Directory, a free online platform that provides complete visibility and direct connections that can fuel revenue growth.
A few of the interesting statistics that came out of the presentations at VeeamON include:
- Veeam is on a high growth curve. Last year it achieved over 28 per cent YoY growth, $607 million in total revenue bookings.
- The company had 231,000 customers at the end of last year, adding 4,000 new customers every month.
- Today, Veeam has the largest network of channel partners who deliver Veeam-powered solutions for cloud data management and protection, including 47,000 Veeam ProPartners and 15,000 VCSPs offering backup and disaster recovery services, including 2,900 partners who use Veeam Cloud Connect to offer backup and disaster recovery in the cloud.
- As per recent customer satisfaction survey results, which will be partly published soon, Veeam’s Net Promoter Score is almost twice the industry average.
- The company is committed to investing $126 million in marketing, representing 20 per cent of the company’s revenues
New product announcements
NEW offerings in Veeam’s ‘Always-On Cloud’ Availability Platform enable service providers and resellers to help customers migrate to and manage data in a Multi-Cloud environment, while greatly expanding revenue opportunities to manage and protect public cloud and physical workloads. The new innovations include:
- Migrating, Managing and Protecting Public Cloud (AWS, Azure and others)
As the adoption of cloud computing across organisations of all sizes grows, the ability to efficiently deliver, manage and monitor Availability infrastructure can be difficult. The new Veeam Availability Console – planned to be generally available in Q3 with its Release Candidate build launched at VeeamON 2017 this week – delivers everything a service provider or distributed enterprise needs to deploy, manage and monitor Veeam-powered Availability services, no matter where the protected workloads are hosted.Veeam’s partners can add value by provisioning and managing customers’ virtual, physical and cloud-based Veeam Availability services and generate new revenue streams by offering BaaS and DRaaS services alongside their traditional resale business lines. - Protecting Enterprise Mission-Critical Applications with NEW Veeam CDP and vCloud Director Integration
To minimise costs and reduce recovery times during a disaster, Veeam is introducing specific DRaaS enhancements for service providers, including:
o Veeam CDP (continuous data protection) empowers service providers to help customers protect and recover Tier-1 applications during a disaster, opening substantial revenue-generating services for VCSPs by using Veeam Cloud Connect. Veeam Cloud Connect uses vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) to offer continuous replication to private or managed clouds.
o vCloud Director integration for Veeam Cloud Connect Replication, enabling partners to reduce daily management and maintenance cost, and simplify multi-tenant configuration by using vCloud organisations for DRaaS. - Tape as a Service (TaaS)
Tape as a Service (TaaS) for Veeam Cloud Connect Backups enables service providers to deliver an additional ‘tape out’ service to help tenants meet compliance requirements for archival and long-term retention, have air-gapped backups to protect against ransomware or insider threats, and provide an additional layer of disaster recovery protection in case of complete storage loss. - NEW Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 with Multi-Tenancy
Veeam is also announcing an update to Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 with multi-tenancy, which delivers the ability for service providers to expand their platform of Veeam-powered services, creating new recurring revenue streams, and grow their service provider business.
Veeam’s new update improves total cost of ownership and offers several key new features, including:- A multi-repository, multi-tenant architecture, enabling protection of larger Office 365 deployments with a single installation, while also empowering service providers to deliver Office 365 backup services;
- Automation possibilities via the RESTful API and PowerShell SDK to minimise management overhead, improve recovery times and reduce costs.
Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East, Africa & SAARC at Veeam said, “We have had terrific feedback from our partners and customers in response to all the product innovations and partner initiatives we unveiled at VeeamON. We are creating new and exciting opportunities for providers looking to enter a cloud business or expand their cloud service offering. It is by constantly keeping our ear to the ground and paying attention to the needs of our customers and partners that we have been able to create a dominant position as one of the leading players in the Availability solutions market.”