Veeam Software Inc. kicked off its virtual VeeamOn 2021 event today by previewing a slew of upcoming features for protecting data across Kubernetes clusters, public cloud environments and software-as-a-service applications.

The cloud-centric feature lineup will roll out in the second half of 2021. The new capabilities are part of a plan, outlined by Veeam executives today, to overtake Dell Technologies Inc. in the replication and data protection market to become the largest player by revenue.

According to International Data Corp. research, Veeam is currently the second-largest player with estimated sales of $563 million in the second half of 2020. Dell’s replication and data protection business generated an estimated $746 million.

“I believe that Veeam will become the No. 1 industry leader in total revenue within the next two years,” stated Danny Allan, Veeam’s chief technology officer and senior vice president of product strategy.

Veeam’s strategy to overtake Dell puts an emphasis on building new features to help protect business information in the cloud. The cloud houses a growing portion of companies’ data and is therefore a major driver of sales growth for data protection providers. Veeam says that its cloud-centric Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product, one of the offerings receiving new features as part of the updates announced today, is seeing 222% year-over-year growth.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is being upgraded with a self-service backup and recovery portal to save time for information technology teams. Normally, the responsibility of backing up documents and recovering them after an outage falls on administrators. The self-service portal will allow business users to take over some of the work, which Veeam expects to free up IT department resources for other tasks.

Also arriving to Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is the ability to back up documents to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 Glacier and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Archive Storage. S3 Glacier and Azure Archive Storage are low-cost storage infrastructure services in which companies can keep data for a fraction of the cost of the cloud providers’ standard storage hardware. The tradeoff is that accessing files is somewhat slower, which is why the services are mainly used to hold onto infrequently used records.

Veeam on the occasion is expanding support for AWS and Azure in its flagship data protection platform as well. Companies can now back up not only Microsoft 365 files but also other records to S3 Glacier and Azure Archive Storage. The  platform is additionally receiving support for S3 Glacier Deep Archive, an even lower-cost tier of AWS’ storage service, as well as Google Cloud’s Archive Cloud Storage.

The expanded support for low-cost achieving should be boon to companies implementing the so-called 3-2-1 backup rule. It’s an industry best practice that specifies a firm should have three copies of its data: the main copy, a backup and a copy of the backup. Copies of backup files are typically accessed infrequently, which means it can be advantageous to store them on services such as S3 Glacier that trade off access speed for lower costs.

While at it, Veeam is extending its backup and recovery features to AWS’ Amazon Elastic File System and the Azure SQL cloud database. 

“We moved more than 100 PB of data into our top three cloud object storage providers alone in just the first quarter of 2021, compared to 242 PB in all of 2020,” detailed Allan. However, “data storage in the cloud is just one of the engines that is driving massive growth at Veeam,” the executive noted.

The company is hoping Kubernetes can be another growth driver. Alongside the other updates, the company today announced plans to more closely integrate its Kasten K10 data protection platform for Kubernetes with the rest of its product portfolio. Kasten K10, which Veeam gained through a startup acquisition last year, will gain the ability to store backup data in the same repository as Veeam’s flagship platform. Centralizing files in one place should make them easier to manage. 

Capping off the VeeamOn updates is support for Red Hat’s Red Hat Virtualization hypervisor. The addition will bring the number of virtualization platforms supported by Veeam to four. Veeam initially offered its software for VMware’s vSphere and over time expanded its focus to more hypervisors, as well as other platforms, to support revenue growth.

In the first quarter, Veeam says, its recurring revenues increased by 25% year-over-year. That marks the 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for the company. Large deals jumped more than 240% thanks to strong enterprise demand. 

Photo: Veeam