Rising Higher and Loftier with the Cloud

Last week, in sunny Miami, two thousand plus attendees of VeeamON 2019 applauded when the company’s co-founder, Ratmir Timashev announced the realisation of achieving US$1 billion in total revenue bookings – a prediction he made a little over 5 years ago. This puts Veeam among only 34 pure software companies in the world that has hit US$1 billion in annual sales.

 Enterprise IT News editor, Lorraine Lee, a guest at the conference, sits down individually with Ratmir Timashev, Shaun McLagan (Senior VP of Asia-Pacific and Japan) and Ken Ringdahl (VP of Alliance Architecture) on what’s NEXT? How will Veeam consolidate its grip on its billion-dollar status and what do they see as the ONE technological trend that will help keep the company at the leading edge in the enterprise tech space.

Veeam Software cut its teeth as an Intelligent Data Management company, starting with an early customer, the behemoth VMware. That will always remain the mainstay. However, going forward, the company chooses to place emphasis on Cloud Data Management, promising to restore compromised data in a mere 15 minutes or less.

Timashev sees this as a logical, progressive and feasible strategy as enterprises migrate to some form of cloud – be it fully or hybrid or moving back and forth, and between cloud vendors.

After all, data generation is already estimated at 2.5 quintillion bytes each day currently. This will only accelerate at an exponential rate from now on, necessitating migration of data to the Cloud.  The new economy is powered by Data. If he has to put ONE global technology trend down, data would be it. He sees Cloud, mobile, IoT, 5G and Edge computing as driving the need for data as well as amplifying each other’s data production. All these data need advanced backup, protecting and restoring, which is exactly the business that Veeam is in.

Therefore, Veeam’s ability to capture and lead in Cloud Data Management — a market that will be worth more than US$15 billion by 2020, as estimated by Gartner and IDC – will ensure Veeam is not short of a market to chase.

In addition, Timashev says that besides AWS and Azure, its focus on getting the Microsoft Office 365 platform is premised on the fact that today, there are 130 million user accounts with additions of 3 to 5 million every month. Veeam is only protecting close to 1 million and thus, optimistically see it as unlimited opportunity to grow there!

Incidentally, on its journey to the billion-dollar mark, Veeam has surpassed 350,000 customers, adding new customers at a rate of more than 4,000 each month.

McLagan points out that the high growth area is right in his sweet spot of Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ). The company’s total bookings in APJ grew 36% year on year from 2017 to 2018.  10%-12% of the US$1 billion total bookings can be attributed to the APJ region, some of which markets Veeam had only entered 3-4 years ago.

Ringdahl adds that to procure high value deals and increase Veeam’s customer reach, the company started investing heavily into enterprise sales a couple of years ago by tying up with strategic alliance partners. “Traditionally, we sell to the backup administrator or the infrastructure administrator- we don’t get to talk to the C-suites often but our alliance partners like Nutanix, Microsoft, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE do – so via them, our products can sell top down, while on our own, we work bottom up!”

Even while other companies are dipping their fingers in 5G, IoT, A.I, Machine Learning and all the tidal trends that make up the 4th Industrial Revolution, it seems that Veeam is razor-focused on Cloud Data Management only although Timashev affirms that management is open to invest in adjacent technologies if need be, to accelerate its leadership in this space.

“We will never have our own hardware nor storage nor cloud – we just want to play in the software defined space, and we are cloud and hardware agnostic,” says Ratmir. This is a good play, to give little excuse to their alliance partners to see Veeam as potential threats.

Still, Timashev brings up this phrase, “Only the paranoid survive!” as Veeam must always stay cognisant of new tech disrupting the market that can do things faster and cheaper than its data management solutions can.

Watch closely … besides R&D, adding new offices and massive recruitment in pockets of the world, this writer predicts that its January 2019 funding of US$500m from Insight Venture Partners would surely be put to  strategic acquisitions in the near to middle term.