VeeamON 2015: The USD12 billion disaster recovery opp

The IT industry is moving towards the cloud, a trend that Veeam Software (Veeam) is more than happy to capitalise on. This was evident when they held their partner General Session before their annual main conference, VeeamOn 2015, began in Las Vegas.

They made their first product announcement at the conference, a managed backup portal for service providers, that integrates with Veeam’s Cloud Connect.

During a panel discussion hosted by Veeam’s Senior Vice President of North America sales, Jim Tedesco, partners like Data3 in Australia, Comport, Compunet, and Dubai’s ISIT, almost unanimously agreed that their customers are emphasising the cloud, or are at least considering converged infrastructure systems as their first step towards a private cloud.

Compunet’s Dan Beeler said their business experienced 500-percent increase in license sales from last year, because of the cloud piece while Comport’s Mike Vencei said, “Thirty percent of our net new customers have a Veeam component.”

The opportunity for Veeam’s backup, disaster recovery and virtualisation management software for popular hypervisors, is definitely there as more and more enterprises look towards modernising their data centres.

The strongest motivation for these businesses to do so, is simply because they require 100-percent availability of their workloads, something that Veeam has pointed out, is sorely lacking in a legacy-ridden industry. Dubbed the availability gap, 78-percent of enterprises, intend to do something about it, over the next two years.

Veeam evangelist, Rick Vanover had observed during a roadshow in the Asia Pacific region to promote Veeam Availability Suite v9, that there is pent up demand for Veeam solutions, simply because other products are letting customers down.

The hybrid cloud opportunity for DRaaS

Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev also addressed his partners during the general session. Despite him saying that the enterprise is still a number one priority for Veeam, he also observed that customers are spending less on-premise. An ongoing mantra in the cloud industry is that public and private clouds cannot exist as siloes and should allow easier workload flow between both clouds.

And thanks to the global alliances Veeam has with storage, virtualisation and hypervisor vendors, Veeam’s emphasis now is clear. “Virtualisation, cloud, and storage are the foundation for the public cloud,” he said.

As a result, he urged partners to change their business model and offer more cloud services.

Top on his list is disaster-recovery-as-a service (DRaaS). “Now customers are going to start using disaster recovery on the cloud. DRaaS’ market size will grow from USD1.5 billion to USD12 billion in 5 years.

“We would like to work with you (partners) to develop a hybrid product. So imagine an on-premise solution with additional services and revenue opportunity.”

He went on to explain the market opportunity that comes in the form of their 168,000 customers, that is also growing by about 4000 on average, every month.

“They purchase and deploy on-premise. They are good to sell additional services for the cloud to.”

Also not forgetting is the opportunity that comes from Veeam’s footprint in VMware and Microsoft hypervisors, as well as their respective public clouds.

(This journalist is a guest of Veeam’s to VeeamON 2015 in Las Vegas).