Veeam is now tied with Dell EMC as the No. 1 data protection software provider. But Veeam’s new CEO Anand Eswaran (pictured above, onstage at VeeamON 2022) is gunning to take a commanding share of the crowded backup and recovery market.

Eswaran shared his ambitious goal with media and analysts attending this week’s VeeamON 2022 conference, taking place in Las Vegas. Like many tech conferences, this week’s event is the company’s first major live gathering since 2019.

For Eswaran, the conference marks his debut as the company’s new CEO with partners, customers and industry watchers. Veeam tapped the former RingCentral CEO, whose resume also includes leadership roles at HPE, Microsoft and SAP, in December.

“The one thing that I would love for Veeam is basically getting to an outsize, market leading position,” Eswaran said. “Number one, number two, it doesn’t matter as much as can you get to that 25% to 40% market share the next two or three years.”

Veeam’s current share is 11.7%, according to IDC’s semi-annual data replication and protection market tracker. IDC covering 2H 2021. Analyst Phil Goodwin, vice president of research for IDC’s infrastructure group, said Dell EMC technically has a narrow edge over Veeam. IDC’s policy is if two companies are less than half of 1% apart, they’re considered tied.

Nevertheless, Veeam is trending up while Dell EMC is trending down. Dell EMC’s year-over-year data protection software revenues for last year’s second half of $1.32 billion declined 8%. Veeam had slightly lower revenues, $1.23 grew nearly 20%, according to IDC.

‘Likely’ to Be Number One

“On their current trajectory, they will likely be a clear number one,” Goodwin said. However, Goodwin cautioned that is not a sure thing. “Now, you never know, Dell EMC tends to be more driven in many cases by sales cycles and renewal cycles,” he added. “Their numbers tend to be more volatile than some other vendors. So, they can show a drop this quarter and a huge increase next quarter. You never know entirely what they’re going to do. But the current trend line is certainly the Veeam is on a strong growth path.”

The other major player, Veritas, a market leader that has experienced declining growth in recent years, experienced growth during 2H21. Albeit the growth was only 0.2%, at No. 3, Veritas revenues totaled $1.07, according to the IDC report. “They’ve been working a lot to modernize their portfolio, including NetBackup and their appliances,” Goodwin said. “They’ve been gaining some traction.”

At VeeamON, Answaran said Veeam’s ARR growth for Q1 of this year was 25%, fueled by cloud, SaaS and its Kesten Kubernetes business.

Ransomware Targeting Backups

During Tuesday’s opening keynote, Answaran revealed the results of Veeam’s 2022 Ransomware Trends Report. The report is based on Veeam’s first survey of those from companies who were ransomware attack victims. Roughly 90% of the roughly 1,000 companies surveyed don’t believe they are protecting their backups sufficiently against ransomware attacks.

“Only 10% of companies have data certainty,” Answaran said during the keynote. “It’s mind boggling. The data is stunning.” Answaran also noted that 94% of ransomware attacks were directed at backup repositories. Among them, two thirds were unable to recover their data after the attack. And 80% of successful attacks were against production and application platforms, he said.

Not surprisingly, Answaran maintained that Veeam customers who properly implement its backup systems are protected. “A fraction of our customers have gone through those same issues, because we’ve taken them through the data protection strategies,” he told Channel Futures. “Most of our customers have actually done the foundational things needed to recover instantly.”