Veeam: Niche, but not so niche

By Cat Yong

Veeam Software wants to fix their underinvestment in Asia, by setting up physical presences in China, Japan and Malaysia, before 2015 is over. Veeam’s President and CEO Ratmir Timashev himself came to Asia for the first time, to deliver the news.

Veeam has enjoyed phenomenal growth since being set up in 2006, finding huge demand for their backup and replication solution. But as of now, less than 10-percent of their revenues actually come from outside the United States.

“We had been too focused in North America and Europe,” Timashev admitted, adding that there are about 3000 customers in Asia, at the moment. Out of that, 236 are in Malaysia.

Interestingly, the rate of growth for Veeam in Asia, is actually over 50-percent, more than the 30- to 40-percent overall growth of the company.

Besides, an inside sales office in Kuala Lumpur to support Indonesia and the Philippines, Veeam’s presence in Malaysia is also meant to support and enable their 156 partners in the country.

Asia
Asia has long been viewed as a one of the largest, if not the largest market for goods and services. Tech-wise, Asia is also readier to adopt new technologies, not least of which is modern data centres that are virtualisation-enabled.

Having only been in Asia since 2010, based in Hong Kong, Singapore, and closing deals largely through a huge install base of channel partners, demand for Veeam’s solutions grew.

A typical Veeam customer is already a VMware customer, and since three years ago, Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology is also supported by Veeam’s backup and replication solution. To date, there are around 560,000 VMware customers, of which Veeam has captured around 25-percent.

Timashev pointed out that their product is only seven years old, but it is built for the modern data centre and leverages modern data centre technologies – cloud, virtualisation and modern storage – to meet business requirements today.

The bigger picture – data management
The end game of course, is for a business to be always available, a main differentiation from having its data just ‘backed up’ only, Timashev said.

Veeam’s ‘magical’ ability is being able to spin up virtual machines in minutes, and have them moved into production environments. Services and applications are up and running again, and all it needed was a button push.

However, and despite demand pressure from his customers to also support their on-premise legacy systems, Timashev has set his sights upon something more than just recognition for backup and replication excellence.

“The backup and recovery market is worth USD5.5 billion, but the broader data management market is a USD16 billion market,” he said, adding that he wants 20-percent of that.

The CEO had attributed Veeam’s success to the ‘right place, right time, excellent product’ formula. Keeping the company privately-held, also thwarts any outsider attempt to control its destiny.

Timashev had stated in conclusion, “Symantec called us niche. But, our solutions can be in up to 80-percent of an IT environment.”

But, it doesn’t stop the querying about what else is in the pipeline: A hardware collaboration? A hyperconverged systems play? What? No support for legacy systems? 

So, what else is there to grow for you?