Veeam Analyst Summit 2019

During the week of July 29, 2019, Veeam held its fourth annual analyst summit in La Jolla, California. Largely under embargo, Veeam executives provided presentations, product demonstrations and hosted one-to-one briefings to provide deeper color into the company’s current performance, strategic objectives, go-to-market positioning and portfolio roadmap.

Takeaways from Veeam Analyst Summit

Veeam is largely focusing on making sure that it has the portfolio, sales and marketing engine, partnerships and people in place to execute on what it calls its “Act II,” the hybrid cloud.

Veeam’s “Act I” was becoming ubiquitous in the modern, virtualized data center – a feat that has fueled more than $1 billion in annual bookings as of May 2019. For Veeam, Act II spans core and edge data center, public cloud and mobile environments, as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases. Now a company with 4,000 employees and sales to more than 80% of the Fortune 500, Veeam is positioning as “the most trusted provider of backup solutions that enable cloud data management” to drive its next phase of growth via Act II.

In order to execute on Act II opportunities, Veeam is working to:

• Protect core traction in small-to-midsized businesses’ (SMBs’) virtualized data centers, and at the same time extend market perception and footprint. From a capability perspective, evolving into a cloud data management enabler is fundamental to Veeam’s ability to achieve this goal. The long-awaited Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) Version 10 will add a number of new and enhanced capabilities in areas such as cloud tiering and data integration that are important to the company’s cloud data management competencies.
• Fill out capabilities in areas such as network attached storage (NAS) backup and physical (including Linux), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud workload support. This will help Veeam to continue expanding upstream in the enterprise, and at the same time address a broader range of existing customer requirements.
• Weather a transition from perpetual to subscription-based licensing. This is yielding more payment options, and potentially lower-cost options, for customers. From a business perspective, Veeam is continuing to adapt, for instance adjusting salesforce and channel compensation models.
• Go deeper on a number of strategic alliances. Veeam is building from the Universal Storage API program introduced with VBR 9.5 and the “With Veeam” program introduced in May 2019. It is also increasing emphasis on global systems integrators (GSIs). Alliances will serve not only as revenue and profit drivers but also as competitive differentiators (e.g. Nutanix Mine with Veeam, which enhances Veeam’s ability to compete against the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik).

Evaluator Group Impressions

Where some competitors are shying away from talking about “backup,” Veeam is embracing its roots as the pioneer in backing up virtualized environments. Veeam’s technology has always been centered on data movement, which hasn’t changed as the company builds a more comprehensive list of supported environments. The enhanced NAS support could have the most significant near-term impact, because Veeam’s previously limited NAS data protection capabilities have been impediments to adoption for some IT professionals.

Cloud data management sits at the heart of Veeam’s Act II. Though the market definition of cloud data management is currently murky, the importance of keeping data protected and making it readily accessible when needed – without breaking the bank – is abundantly clear. This is among the most pressing problems facing enterprises as they adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Especially with VAS Version 10 approaching availability, Veeam is putting the pieces in place to solve these problems.

Veeam is learning that, as its purview expands, it needs to maintain traction in its core market as well as maintain focus on its fundamental value proposition of being “simple, reliable and flexible.” Having the same Veeam code and experience across the plethora of environments and workloads it serves is important in this regard. One intriguing real-world example of this was a large Australian retailer that deployed Veeam in its 2,900 stores in the span of only four months. Driving compelling proof of concepts with end users will remain important, but as Veeam scales, so will conveying this message to a more diverse range of stakeholders.

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