With a partnership that has been a year in the making, the Nutanix Inc. infrastructure meets Veeam Software Inc.’s simplified approach to data protection. Veeam boasts the ability to rapidly recover critical business applications and data by revolutionizing cloud-based data management, all the while giving customers the freedom of choice to run on their preferred public cloud platform.

With successful beta testing behind them, Veeam and Nutanix sales teams are gearing up to get products to customers in the near future.

“I think we’re similar companies. We’re a similar size. We’re a similar age. We’re similar (in) our culture of innovation,” said Ken Ringdahl (pictured), vice president of global alliance architecture at Veeam Software Inc. when speaking about the partnership the company forged with Nutanix. “When we got together, it was pretty simple. Now, doing development as two companies is always hard. It’s even harder to do it when it’s one company on your own and get a product to market. So I’d be lying if I said there weren’t bumps along the way. When executive leadership is aligned, that’s when things get done. And we have that between Nutanix and Veeam.” 

Ringdahl spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT Europe event in Denmark. They discussed Veeam’s partnership with Nutanix, the Nutanix Mine ecosystem for storage, and customer trends (see the full interview with transcript here). (*Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: You’re here to talk about the partnership with Nutanix and Mine. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about this partnership, the Mine ecosystem, and what you see for the future.

Ringdahl: Nutanix is a really strategic partner for us. We’ve been partners for quite a while, probably five, six years. The real tipping point for our partnership was when we committed to integrate with Nutanix AHV [for virtualization]. We had supported VMware vSphere from the beginning. That’s what Veeam was founded on. That’s the foundation of our success. We went and did Hyper-V in 2011, and we didn’t do another hypervisor. We still haven’t even done [kernel virtual machine technology] yet, but we saw the value in the Nutanix partnership and we committed to doing AHV and delivered that middle of last year. We’ve seen good pickup on that.

Miniman: Bring us inside Mine and Nutanix. It wants optionality to be there, so Veeam is one of the partners, but likely the most important.

Ringdahl: There’s a lot of similarities between Nutanix and Veeam, especially when it comes to the general approach to partners. We’re a pure software-defined data protection platform. Nutanix, you’re right, had an option: “Hey, maybe we go build this ourselves or we acquire and try to get that revenue, maybe the data protection revenue.” And they’ve decided to partner just like we’ve decided to partner for secondary storage and everything else. 

That really does lead us to Mine, because a lot of our competitors do ship their software on white-box hardware. Some of the emerging startups are doing that, and even some of the legacy players are. We’ve taken a different approach and said, “We know what we’re good at, and we know we want customer choice.”

Miniman: The messaging I’m hearing from Nutanix now reminds me of what I was hearing a couple of years ago from Veeam, specifically when you talk to cloud. What are you hearing from your customers? And do you see those parallel journeys, or will the AHV integration mean that as Nutanix goes along that journey, that Veeam and Nutanix offerings will be able to live in these multiple cloud environments?

Ringdahl: I think a little bit of both. Our goal is to support those workloads wherever they are. We made our ha,y and we were founded on attaching the vSphere, then Hyper-V, then HV, and now AWS and Azure — and all these other environments. We follow our customers along their journey. There’s customers today that may be smaller, newer companies that go straight to AWS, straight to Azure, they’re born in the cloud, and they’re cloud-only. They may not be the best fit for Veeam. They may just buy point solutions for the larger customers that have hybrid environments. That’s what we’re looking to attack. Whether that’s with Nutanix and VMware and those workloads that go, we want to make sure we give our customers the best experience and the ability to burst to the cloud and move around and workload portability.

We built features into the product. We’ve revolutionized our licensing to make that easier. So that’s what we’re after — those hybrid customers solving those problems and those challenges they haven’t, building on our strength, which starts on-prem but has moved into the cloud.

Knight: What do you see as some of the trends on the horizon? Talk about some of the problems that are keeping (your customers) up at night and how your solution solves them.

Ringdahl: When it comes to data protection, everyone can say, “Hey, my backups, they were 100% successful.” It comes down to restore, reliability, and security. And we’ve built a lot into our product to give customers that peace of mind. And oftentimes when we’re converting customers over from maybe a competitor’s product, that’s what we hear the most. It’s the reliability and the confidence in the infrastructure, and that’s what we focus on most.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Europe event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Europe event. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE