Four VeeamOn’s Later, Availability and the Industry Has Evolved

veeam on 2019

This week, I was in Miami for what was my fourth VeeamON. The annual conference has grown from a small and dedicated show into a huge event that is critical for anyone in the industry who works in the data protection industry to attend.

This year, thousands of attendees packed the Fontainebleau hotel along with vendors to learn more about where Veeam is headed and how the industry continues to evolve with new security threats and models for delivering robust availability.

On day one, the company focused on their plans to add new features to their software along with the significant announcement of $1 billion in annual books and the fact that they are adding 4000 new customers each month. During the day two keynote, it was more future-focused with a presentation by Nancy Giordano.

But each year, the tune of the show has changed and it’s becoming clear that Veeam is no longer a little company playing in the backup space but has become its own ecosystem that is the center of availability for nearly every type of data both locally and in the cloud.

For the past couple of VeeamOn events, I have been interviewing vendors as well as Veeam employees at the show and while the story is usually similar, meaning vendors want you to use their hardware or their cloud as the endpoint for Veeam software, this year also had many vendors talking about security. It also became apparent this year how Veeam’s software has transformed an industry and turned backups from a disaster recovery feature but to a true, value-add, for its customers on a daily basis.

As an industry outsider looking in, this is a minor but significant change. With security being an evergreen topic, Veeam has found itself in the middle of the conversation about how to not only prepare for an outage but also how to prepare and protect your data when an intrusion or ransomware attack occurs. And make no mistake, it’s only a matter of time before every company has a data integrity issue: the difference between those who continue to grow following a disruption to their business is tied closely to how well they can manage the outage to their services.

Vendors who are working with Veeam, many of whom we interviewed this week, are talking about one thing; availability under all circumstances. Each vendor solves a different piece of the puzzle and Veeam orchestrates the recovery process. And these support vendors are not mom and pop shops, Microsoft, Lenovo, HPE, and many others now attend VeeamOn as they know that this event is quickly becoming a central hub for understanding the new trends in data protection.

Four years after my first VeeamOn, the company has grown at a rate that I don’t think many could have predicted. And with data recovery now being one of the central focuses of the new security landscape, Veeam is in a unique position to tell the industry what it needs to know, not the other way around.