Veeam torpedoes HPE acquisition rumours

Veeam and HPE executives have torpedoed rumours of a potential acquisition by the enterprise hardware vendor, during a conference where their strong partnership was heavily touted.

It was speculated in March by The Register that HPE was looking to round out its recent spree of acquisitions, which includes hyperconvergence vendor Simplivity and storage provider Nimble, by picking up the backup and disaster recovery vendor.

Veeam co-CEO Peter McKay, recently promoted to the role alongside co-founder Andrei Baronov, doused the rumours, telling CRN at the VeeamOn conference in New Orleans that a deal was not on the table.

“I would categorise that as a total fabricated story, that somehow got in the market; there’s never been a conversation that we’ve had about acquisitions,” he said.

“We have a strong partnership together, we’ve amped up the relationship together in that, before it was a lot of joint development, now its joint sales... a process which has been a big win for both companies, but that’s it. It’s not been ever a discussion about an acquisition.

“We don’t need or want an acquisition unless something dramatically different happens. I mean, we don’t wanna say never say never but that’s not what we’re looking for.”

Bill Philbin, senior vice president of GM storage and big data solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, was letting no hints either.

“You must know I’ve been media trained,” he asked CRN in response to the rumour’s legitimacy. “We don’t talk about rumours on acquisitions.

“I could see how people could get there, logically because of the partnership, in December we signed reseller agreements so our folks can sell Veeam, I could see how people could stitch that together but other than that we’re focused on the partnership.”

While the acquisition rumours seem to have been quelled for the time being, McKay did comment that Veeam expects to leverage HPE, particularly in Asia-Pacific, to hit its $1 billion 2018 revenue target.

“Its clearly an opportunity for us, when we think of how to get to one billion, it has to happen through APJ. EMEA growing and continues to grow very successfully, the north America market, which was under EMEA... that’ll come close to EMEA pretty soon. But the real upside growth is going to come through APJ,” he said.

“HPE has a lot of partners already. They'll have the ability to now sell Veeam as part of HPE’s solution, whether it's in storage or converged, and so that's going to allow us to leverage HPE’s channel in all the countries. That in itself will have a significant impact on our APJ business.”

Michael Jenkin travelled to New Orleans as a guest of Veeam