UPDATED 16:30 EDT / JUNE 18 2020

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Simple, flexible and reliable approach positions Veeam for new growth following US expansion

According to one global annual survey, 97% of businesses backed up organizational data, yet nearly 30% suffered data loss. At first glance, the survey results don’t make any sense.

The problem is that data is growing exponentially and so are the devices where it is stored. Just finding all of the places where it must be accessed for backup is a challenge itself. This has placed greater reliance on companies such as Veeam Software Corp. which is in the business of data protection and management. And it may explain why Veeam’s previous year was very strong indeed.

Veeam’s bookings of $1.06 billion in 2019, 12 consecutive years of growth, and consistently high customer satisfaction ratings point toward a model that appears to be getting the job done. Yet, it’s helpful to get behind the numbers to see how Veeam manages to maintain its lofty position in the backup and cloud data management space.

veeam-2019-bookings

A portion of the answer stems from the company’s focus on staying on top of the next tech wave to avoid being buried by it while building trust with its 375,000 customers.

“We go to cloud, to containers, to edge, and every time we go through those iterations there is an opportunity for the next generation of platforms to emerge,” said Danny Allan (pictured, right), Veeam’s chief technology officer. “Veeam’s focus here is to make sure we are ahead of those trends, to make sure we are thinking ahead of our customers. We go through this cycle over and over again, and, ultimately, it’s the vendor, the partner that is most trusted that wins.”

Allan spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the VeeamOn event. He was joined by Bill Largent (pictured, left), chief executive officer of Veeam, and Jim Kruger (pictured, center), Veeam’s chief marketing officer. They discussed Veeam’s software-defined roots, integration tools for its products, the importance of company culture, and Veeam’s future plans following its acquisition in 2020. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud propels growth

Cloud has been a distinct tailwind for Veeam. The company has focused on providing Veeam Backup solutions for major cloud providers.

In December, Veeam launched its backup product for Amazon Web Services Inc. following the release of a similar solution for Microsoft Office 365. The company also offers backup support for Azure and Google Cloud.

“We always highlight simple, flexible, reliable,” Allan said. “We’ve been software-defined from the very beginning. Being software-defined helps us not only win the data center, but helps our customers as they go through that evolution from on-premises to storing backups in the cloud to actually running workloads in the cloud and protecting them there.”

Veeam is also moving forward with initiatives for Kubernetes and backups for cloud-native applications. The company’s focus on data management includes tools for data mobility, visibility and monitoring, which highlights the need for solutions such as Veeam’s Availability Suite and a full integration platform.

“It enables you to have a central common control across the entire organization, but yet you can deploy in the native environments that make the most sense,” said Allan, who cited a recently announced backup product for AWS. “You’re running on an interface that you deploy out of the AWS Marketplace, but that product integrates back into Veeam Availability Suite. Every time we add a new capability across the platform, whether software-as-a-service, virtual or cloud, we make sure that it still has that central connection to the main control plane. That’s why we call this cloud data management, because it gives you that data management across all of these different infrastructures.”

Strong cultural philosophy

Flexibility and simplicity are not only tenets of Veeam’s approach to product design; they also capture the company’s cultural philosophy. A strong company culture can be sensed by customers, and that helps drive business results.

“I’m a big believer that the culture can really differentiate a company in the marketplace, and Veeam’s culture in the past has really done that effectively. It shows in the success of the company,” Kruger noted. “One of the things I learned in coming to Veeam was to win the hearts and minds of the customers you are serving. That can be a party, being totally open and listening to your customers, giving them different channels for feedback, and just being a company that’s easy to do business with.”

The company has taken measurement of customer satisfaction to heart. Veeam pointedly notes on its website a Net Promoter Score of 75, which is higher than widely visible brands such as Amazon Inc. and Netflix Inc.

“One of the challenges as you get larger and go from $1 billion to $2 billion is that a lot of companies miss the beat relative to staying connected to their customers,” Kruger said. “That’s something that we’re putting a tremendous amount of focus on.”

An attentive ear to customer feedback may become especially important given the changes that Veeam has experienced in 2020. The company was sold earlier this year to Insight Partners for $5 billion, which also triggered several changes in top management.

However, Largent noted that Insight was not an unfamiliar presence within the Veeam family.

“A few of us have been around the Insight team since 2002, and they are a very well-known group of individuals to us,” Largent said. “They know the infrastructure space really well. It’s a nice resource to have for things we might want to do in the future related to acquisitions.”

When Insight purchased Veeam, it made no secret of its plans to extend the newly purchased firm’s backup and cloud data management advantage outside of the European market. Veeam became a U.S. company with a US-based leadership team and a mandate to continue its impressive run of growth, which currently includes 81% of Fortune 500 companies.

“The story about Veeam is growth,” Largent said. “We’ll even bring the fight much harder now that we’re in the U.S. We don’t plan on being comfortable with where we are.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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