Veeam's focus is to deliver modern data protection solutions for multi-cloud enterprise

Veeam Software is a privately-held, US information technology company with a US-based leadership team.

Founded in 2006, Veeam focused on simplifying backups for virtual machines. It continues to charge forward to innovate the industry so you can own, control and protect your data anywhere in the hybrid cloud. In March 2020, Veeam was acquired by Insight Partners which has enable them to expand into new markets and continue the growth trajectory.

Here, Shiva Pillay, GM and SVP, Asia Pacific and Japan, Veeam Software, and Sandeep Bhambure, VP, India & SAARC, Veeam Software, tell us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What is Veeam’s vision to deliver more breakthrough innovations that will help customers drive business efficiency and agility for the next stage of digital transformation?

Shiva Pillay: Veeam provides a clear path to Modern Data Protection that is driven by capabilities that focus on achieving any recovery objective, maximizing your investment, and reducing management overhead with products that “just work.” Over the past year, Veeam has unveiled more than 30 product updates including Veeam Backup and Replication v11a which includes the cloud-native solutions to protect data across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. These innovations ensured Veeam enjoyed a record FY21, reporting 27% ARR growth YoY, with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 business growing faster than expected with 73% YoY growth and Veeam Availability Suite growing over 36% YoY.

The success continued during Q2 2022 which was Veeam’s 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth with an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 22% year-over-year (YoY).

Our key innovations include cloud-native solutions (for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud) and SaaS offerings (Microsoft 365 and Salesforce), as well as deeper integration of Kasten by Veeam K10 for Kubernetes protection and, of course, the highly anticipated Veeam Backup and Replication v12. Our key focus for this year is to deliver modern data protection solutions for the multi-cloud enterprise and help customers efficiently manage and backup all critical data in their environment.

DQ: How has Veeam expanded its offerings to cover strategic workloads, including Cloud, Kubernetes, and Containers?

Shiva Pillay: With our constant innovation and product-led growth, we continue to set the highest product standards and respond to customer demands for redefining security, ensuring resilience and delivering future-ready solutions. We enable our customers and partners to own, control and securely backup and recover their data anywhere in the hybrid cloud. Some of our recent offerings covering strategic workloads, include Cloud, Kubernetes and Containers:

Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.0
Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.0 Kubernetes data management platform – a purpose-built for Kubernetes, is focused on delivering a comprehensive risk management strategy, streamlined CI/CD pipelines and new ecosystem advancement details that optimize and de-risk Kubernetes investments. The capabilities introduced in NEW Kasten K10 V5.0 underscores Kasten’s dedication to Kubernetes users by integrating DevOps and shift-left principles and hardened security.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7
Veeam demonstrated advanced monitoring and reporting for the upcoming Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7, expected later this year. As the Microsoft 365 backup market leader, with over 11M users under paid contract, the new version will include enterprise-grade monitoring and reporting capabilities as a result of integration with Veeam ONE, helping to keep systems and infrastructure running smoothly thanks to built-in intelligence.

Veeam Backup for Salesforce
Following the success of its Microsoft 365 product, Veeam previewed Veeam Backup for Salesforce, a much sought-after addition to Veeam’s portfolio. With the ability to back up in the cloud and on-premises, the new offering eliminates the risk of losing Salesforce data and metadata.

DQ: How is Veeam’s ecosystem of technology partners, resellers and service providers, alliance partners, as well as Veeam Global System Integrators (VGSIs) in APJ driving digital transformation for customers?

Shiva Pillay: Veeam has great ambitions to reach new heights as a trusted technology partner in modern data protection, but also remains committed to taking its wider ecosystem on the journey to achieving growth and success across APJ. While the macro trends facing the IT industry provide many challenges, such as the threat from ransomware attacks and the global adoption of multi-/hybrid-cloud architectures, we, as a community, have rallied together to deliver the most robust solutions to our customers and the wider ecosystem.

Veeam’s focus is to help APJ organizations to recover their data without paying ransoms and to deliver Modern Data Protection solutions to keep business critical data safe. This also includes sharing the know-how and best practices when it comes to ransomware and data protection. By strengthening our offering of innovative cloud-based solutions and services, Veeam helps its partners in re-evaluating their approach to implementing the best strategies for their customers that maximizes both efficiencies and cost savings, all the while ensuring data availability and protection.

Veeam’s growth is not reliant on just its channel partners, but also driven by its alliances and VGSIs. Through the partnership with Veeam, GSIs can gain access to proven solutions and technology innovation with Veeam’s alliance partners, who are global leaders in infrastructure, cloud, and applications.

DQ: What is Veeam’s go-to-market strategy to reach its revenue goal?

Shiva Pillay: Veeam is a 100% channel business, and our ecosystem includes valued service providers, resellers, distributors, and alliance partners to service customers’ modern data protection needs. The biggest component to our go to market strategy is that we rely on our partners. Our growth strategy makes it very attractive for our resellers to work with us as we grow and help them grow their business around the complementary services.

What distinguishes us as a channel-centric vendor is how we collaborate with our partners and provide considerable and continuous benefits. Our service provider business (VCSP business) is another area where we’re seeing significant expansion. As customers look to buy things as a service, we’re helping service providers deliver to our customer base.

Veeam has over 3,000 resellers and distributors in APJ. We have designed our ProPartner Network in a way to provide our partners tools and technologies to help create demand for their customer base. Our flexible approach to data protection enables partners to build and deliver a data protection solution for their customers regardless of where they want to host their data and however, they wish to procure it, be it on a rental or subscription basis.

We have designed our Partner Programs around the same principal. “Your success is our mission” is the foundation of our channel programs and our promise to our partners. Over the years Veeam has built an extensive partner network to constitute a strong channel ecosystem across markets.

DQ: Provide some insights into Veeam's business and growth plans in India.

Sandeep Bhambure: Veeam provides modern data protection solutions for the multi-cloud enterprise through strong alliance partnerships and seamless technology integrations with leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Cloud, and IBM Cloud. We have been consistently performing, the company has been tied #1 Data Replication & Protection Provider (DR&P) worldwide, in IDC’s Semi-annual Software Tracker for 2H’21.

In addition to our global position, Veeam was the market share leader in EMEA and LATAM, third in APJ, and had the fastest YoY growth among the top five companies in all three regions. Being tied as #1 in the market is a huge accomplishment for not only Veeam, but our entire ecosystem. Our customers and partners deserve credit for making this a reality.

APJ has been one of our fastest growing regions with an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 27% year-over-year (YoY) in Q2’22. Within APJ, India plays an important role in the region's growth, with brands such as Granules India, Mahindra Group, Hero MotoCorp, deploying our solutions. In India we plan to achieve rapid growth for our customers through our partner ecosystem. As we continue to gain market share and grow in India, we are also looking to expand our scale by investing in technology, talent, and areas that can help our customers and partners grow.

DQ: What is Veeam’s vision behind its first ever modern data protection focused roadshow in India?

Sandeep Bhambure: Businesses' reliance on data, as well as the amount of data generated by them, is growing and making organizations even more vulnerable to cyberattacks. According to the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022, in the last 12 months, 84% of Indian organizations were hit with ransomware, making cyber-attacks one of the leading causes of downtime for the second year in a row.

Veeam Software launched ‘Hop On Veeam: Your journey to Modern Data Protection’, a multi-city bus roadshow to raise awareness around the growing need for data protection solutions and demonstrate its ability to help Indian businesses own, control, backup and recover data anywhere it resides – on premises or in the cloud. We aim to create a platform for our partners, customers, and distributors to gain insightful discussions on the current data protection landscape and engage with Veeam stakeholders about key data protection best practices.

Furthermore, the on-demand live demos on cloud-native solutions enable us to highlight all the challenges that we can address. Be it hardware, cloud, ransomware or moving closer to microservices and containers, Veeam can provide solutions that cater to all your modern data protection needs. With majority of our new business originating from smaller cities, we believe it is critical for us to connect with and educate our partners not only in the metros but also the tier 2 markets such as Jaipur, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, etc. Veeam is growing at 3X times its market rate as we are deeply investing money and time in India and its businesses of all scales This is a testament to our commitment to the partner ecosystem.

DQ: In addition to technology solutions, what else do companies need to work on to build a good backup strategy, especially when they suffer from a cyber-attack?

Shiva Pillay: According to the 2022 Ransomware Trends Report, the most common entry point for a cyber-attack is still phishing emails, malicious links, or a website that has dubious underpinnings. In considering the old mantra, “go with what works” it is unfortunate that even in 2022 with all the global awareness of ransomware and corporate training available, this is still the leading cause. That said, there is plenty that IT professionals can do to work towards building a good backup strategy:

Paying the ransom is not a recovery strategy: Of the organizations surveyed during the Ransomware Research Survey, the majority (76%) of cyber-victims paid the ransom to end an attack and recover data. One of the hallmarks of a strong Modern Data Protection strategy is a commitment to a clear policy that the organization will never pay the ransom. Another important aspect is educating employees and ensuring they practice impeccable digital hygiene

Prevention requires diligence from both IT and users: Cyber-villains most often first gained access to production environments through errant users clicking malicious links, visiting unsecure websites or engaging with phishing emails — again exposing the avoidable nature of many incidents

Remediation starts with immutability: Respondents to the survey confirmed that 94% of attackers attempted to destroy backup repositories and in 72% of cases this strategy was at least partially successful. The only way to protect against this scenario is to have at least one immutable or air-gapped tier within the data protection framework

In addition to the above, we also recommend adopting the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy which essentially means you have three copies of your data, on two different media types – one copy should be off-site and one copy being offline, air-gapped, or immutable and lastly there should be 0 errors after automated backup, testing and recoverability verification. Having a “ultra-resilient” copy of backup data that is either offline, air-gapped or immutable is an incredibly resilient specimen to help ensure data recovery in a ransomware event.

DQ: Why do you think you will succeed when there are other players too? What is the differentiator?

Shiva Pillay: Veeam has always differentiated itself with the ability to look forward and also the strength in the products that we release to the market. Our goal has always been to solve today’s problems and future-proof tomorrow. We knew from the beginning that cloud computing would be the next big thing, and we've been preparing for it – with cloud in focus, we offer native protection for the three big cloud providers and continue to provide support for those.

We are now building competencies around Kubernetes with Kasten acquisition, which is the next phase after hybrid cloud. Hence, our strategy has always been to focus on the trends early-on where customers will move. This way, we prepare beforehand for the upcoming technology waves and our differentiation is that we provide simple, reliable, and flexible solutions catering to our customer’s requirements.

We are focused on product differentiation and providing a choice to our customers and partners. According to 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant, Veeam is the only company that is software-focused and hardware-agnostic. We have no agenda to push any sort of hardware, we want to give customers the choice to select their own hardware.

Another key differentiation is our philosophy of Veeam Universal License (VUL) which is a simple and flexible per-workload license that can be consumed for workloads across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Unlike other players in the market, VUL is portable across workloads, providing customers flexibility in terms of portability. It also makes protecting and restoring backups easier than ever while avoiding appliance lock-ins and additional fees.

DQ: Your focus seems to be more on IT/ITeS industries. What about other verticals/areas?

Shiva Pillay: Veeam is growing at a much more rapid rate. We continue to focus on industry vertical led orientation and building a strong leadership team to ensure strong relevance for the APJ market. India plays an important role in the overall growth of the APJ region. We are committed to providing the best-in-class data protection technologies to businesses across all industries and markets.

In addition to the IT/ITeS industry, we see a huge opportunity to further expand our market share in verticals such as Automotive, BFSI, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Telecom, Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) and the service industry. We have pre-eminent brands such as Mahindra Group, Granules India Parul University, Hero MotoCorp, Future Generali, Kunal Structure, Havmor and 63 Moons etc., from these markets who are already deploying our solutions. Our key focus for this year, would be to double up our efforts within these key markets and deliver solutions to help customers on their modern data protection journey.