Veeam CEO Provides Virtualization and Backup Roadmap for MSPs in 2015

Veeam Software CEO Ratmir Timashev told MSPmentor this week that following the company’s move to give MSPs the ability to back data up into public clouds the next logical step for 2015 will be to enable replication between its software running on premise and the cloud.

Why? Costs of cloud computing continue to fall. That means providing continuous availability of applications via public cloud has become more effective, Timashev said.

MSPs should remember that when they replicate an application, all the malware that might have infected that application stays with it. For that reason Timashev said MSPs need to make sure they have also backed up a pristine image of that application.

Protecting physical devices

Timashev added that in 2015 Veeam will also extend the ability of its MSPs partners to protect physical devices. The company has already made available a free version of its data protection software for endpoints. Timashev said Veeam also plans to provide the capability to protect data running on multiple types of virtual and physical machines.

That does not necessarily mean, however, that Veeam will provide that capability inside its core software until it is certain that is providing end users with the same fast backup and recovery capabilities it currently provides for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V machines. In virtual machine environments, Veeam is providing recovery time objectives of under 15 minutes. In the meantime, Timashev said Veeam will work with a number of providers of MSP management platforms to help MSPs unify the delivery of data protection services.

Veeam milestones

Veeam earlier this month announced that its total revenue bookings grew 65 percent in the third quarter on a year-over-year basis. That marks the company’s 27th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue booking growth on a year-over-year basis. Veeam also said it has acquired approximately 10,000 new customers in the third quarter and that it is on average signing up 3,000 new customers a month, with total paid Veeam customers now surpassing 121,500. In addition, Veeam said that 45 percent of the Global 2000 are Veeam customers.

Much of that success, said Timashev, can be directly attributed to the fact that Veeam initially focused squarely on the data protection needs of administrators of virtual machines in the small-to-medium business (SMB) space rather than traditional storage administrators. But now Timashev noted that the company’s foot print is expanding in the enterprise as well. Veeam claims the number of new enterprise customers grew 108 percent year-over-year, while revenue from enterprise customers grew 140 percent over that same period.

Veeam is also reporting the revenue generated through the Veeam Cloud Provider program grew revenues by 159 percent as well in the third quarter and that there are now 6,000 partners participating in that program.

Consider what Veeam’s growth means in terms of just how many of workloads are now running on virtual machines that used to run on physical servers. And while those workloads shifted to virtual machines, the data protection software that had been protecting them may have not made the transition from the physical to virtual environment.