Veeam Eyes Hybrid Cloud With Partnerships and Updated Software

(Pictured above: Veeam’s Ratmir Timashav delivering his keynote address at VeeamON this week in Miami.)

VEEAMON 2019 – Veeam Software, which specializes in data management and backup, made its bones over the last 10 years with backup and disaster recovery solutions for virtual machines from the likes of VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. However, the company is continuing to expand into the hybrid cloud environment, which officials say will be the next big opportunity for data backup, recovery and management.

On the first day of the VeeamON 2019 show in Miami, company officials unveiled plans to expand its reach into secondary storage through technology partnerships and also introduced Veeam Availability Orchestrator V2, which they said will help democratize the data recovery (DR) process by making it easier, less costly and more comprehensive.

It comes at a time when massive amounts of data are being generated, stored, processed and analyzed in multiple places, from the core data center to the public cloud and now the edge. The distributed and hybrid nature of the current data-centric IT environment presents challenges around managing, moving and protecting the data.

“Data management and data protection in the hybrid cloud is the next big opportunity,” Ratmir Timashav, Veeam co-founder and executive vice president for sales and marketing, told journalists and analysts before the morning keynote address.

It fits in with the message Veeam officials have been touting in recent years, according to Krista Macomber, senior analyst with Storage Switzerland.

Storage Switzerland’s Krista Macomber

“Their thing is that things are changing again,” Macomber told Channel Futures, noting that much of the company’s first 10 years were built on its work with VMs. “They want to support all these different environments with the same platform.”

A key offering is the Veeam Availability Suite, a platform that ensures data availability for workloads in physical, virtual, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud environments through a single management console, and includes monitoring and analytics, orchestration, backup and replication and API integrations. Over the last couple of years, Veeam has delivered new features to the suite, from universal storage APIs and cloud mobility to cloud tiers, cloud-ready instance licensing and direct restore to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure Stack.

Veeam comes into this new hybrid cloud phase with some momentum. Timashav said that over the past 12 months, the company’s annual bookings have run past $1 billion and that it now has more than 350,000 customers. That compares with the 6,000 customers Veeam had 10 years ago. The company is adding 4,000 new customers every month and about 50,000 every year.

Health care company UnitedHealthcare has been a customer for about 10 years. Jeremy Brummett, senior manager of infrastructure and operations at UnitedHealthcare, said during the keynote that…