Veeam has beefed up its public cloud disaster recovery and backup with products for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, following success in the Australian channel around Office 365.
The vendor announced new versions of its Availability Suite and Availability Console at its VeeamOn conference taking place 16-18 May in New Orleans.
The new tools will include options around migration, management and protection for workloads, servers and endpoints for public clouds AWS and Azure. Availability Console will be generally available in the third quarter of 2017, with a release candidate build launched this week.
The company, which now touts 231,000 customers via 47,000 Veeam ProPartners and 15,000 Veeam cloud service partners, outlined its intention to become a US$1 billion dollar company by 2018.
It's a feat no company other than VMware had achieved within a nine-year period, according to co-chief executive and president Peter McKay.
“We need to continue to leverage the great power of the partner ecosystem, our partners today are more critical than ever,” he told the conference crowd.
“Our competitors are moving away from the channel, we believe we need the channel now more than ever, to pull the software, the services the hardware together, to offer those business outcomes for our companies.”
Veeam made several other announcements to its product lineup, including multi-tenancy, multi-repository and automation capabilities in Office 365; a Veeam cloud and service provider directory to connect resellers and service providers; and a new service provider program.
“Veeam has always been a 100 percent channel company. With these new solutions Veeam is strengthening its leadership position in the backup as a service and disaster recovery-as-a-service market and extends its 100 percent channel strategy from resellers to service providers,” McKay said.
Aussie partners speak
Chris Marshall, managing director of Blue Apache spoke to CRN on the sidelines of the VeeamOn conference, where he revealed the vendor’s approach was a hit with BlueApache’s engineering team.
“Historically backup and recovery has been a very resource intensive aspect of delivering service, Veeam’s made us far more efficient in that capacity,” Marshall said. Blue Apache was Victoria’s first platinum Veeam cloud and service provider partner.
Marshall said disasters such as the global WannaCry ransomware strike also drive adoption of security solutions.
“We’re seeing a lot more interest in security and business continuity at an executive and board level. Historically it’s been left to IT or finance, but now particularly at a board level, organisations are taking a far greater interest in what their current posture is around those aspects and that’s driving further investments,” he said.
“Cryptolocker has brought security to the forefront; it’s impacted so many organisations of all sizes and I think an element of fear has spread throughout the industry. Everybody knows somebody who has been affected by Cryptolocker. It’s been the catalyst for a significant interest in security at a board an executive level.”
Dileepa Kariyawasam, senior consultant with Perth-based IT solution provider and Microsoft MVP Empired, said ease of adoption was one of Veeam’s strong points.
“Vendors need to come up with new products and educate partners; they have to drive their proposition. Sometimes vendors release new products to the market and partners don’t know what exactly it does. The partner needs to get educated, the vendor needs to the educate the partners,” he said.
Kariyawasam said roughly 20 percent of Empired's customers used Veeam, particularly for the vendor’s backup solutions around Microsoft's offerings like Azure and Office 365.
“As a Microsoft partner we need to know about end-to-end products that our customers use so that we can give them end-to-end consultation,” he said.
Veeam is gaining about 4000 new customers each month, according to McKay. In 2016 the company saw US$607 million in revenue bookings, a 28 percent year-on-year growth. McKay also highlighted the company had a net promoter score of 73, versus an industry average of 32 percent, and a customer renewal rate of 87 percent.
Michael Jenkin travelled to New Orleans as a guest of Veeam
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