Veeam reinforces its leadership position in the cloud data management space at VeeamON Forum 

Veeam recently hosted the Indian edition of its biggest annual conference, VeeamON Forum in Bengaluru. The Forum brought together a platform to discuss the latest technologies and strategies for cloud data management. The event also had a glimpse of the Veeam customers and partners who came together to share ideas, challenges, and solutions in an ever-changing data management landscape. Veeam’s global, regional and local spokespeople were also present at the event and provided an opportunity to the guests to immerse themselves in the latest technologies and strategies for cloud data management.

On the side-lines of the event, VARINDIA decided to catch up with the regional and global leadership team from Veeam and talk to them about how and where they feel is the company moving and the kind of business roadmap they have with respect to steering the company ahead in the cloud software space - 

Asanga Wanigatunga
VP, Cloud & Service Providers – APJ
Veeam Software

“Multi-cloud has become a big reality. What we have been seeing in the past is that if organizations have a two-tier, three-tier applications running in the datacenter, the entire architecture looks exactly the same. In the last 6-8 years, that transformation is shifting and we can see customers seeing some of these applications running even on mainframe. For instance core banking applications are running on IBM architectures. And this not going to change. Same way we have seen customers have gone down the virtualization path. In the physical environments, there were multi-tier applications that literally lifted and shifted the applications to virtualization. Customers get much better cost benefit in virtualization. Even in virtualization, there can be 3-4 virtualization accounts. If we see large enterprise accounts, they run on VMware, Microsoft, HP, Nutanix KVM, simultaneously. We are increasingly seeing enterprises building cloud native applications. So they no longer have everything in a box in my datacenter; I have to manage effectively 4,5, 8 different architectures and know where all my assets are.    

Talking about data protection software, any organization that is evaluating to migrate from a hardware data protection to software data protection would look at things like Cost. If you have an enterprise application running and you are using a different data protection product, whether it is a software or a hardware, the question you have to ask yourself is what kind of benefits are you getting. If we put our data protection product in, are you adding more value to the business? Another scenario is that just because I have put a better data protection product does not mean my application would run better and it will give incremental top line value to the organization.  So the time to assess that is when it is time to refresh your stack.” 

Sandeep Bhambure
VP and Managing Director, India and SAARC 
Veeam Software

“We are a 100% channel organization and are now reaching out to a much broader channel base to cover the India market. One of the key USPs in terms of Veeam’s business is the velocity of the business itself. The channel does not like to get trapped into complex solutions where they are not able to turn around and rotate their revenues fast enough. They want to go ahead, deploy the solution quickly, get the money and go on to the next project. When you are able to deploy a solution with great simplicity, it also means that the product is very reliable, simple and there is good level of customer satisfaction. 

The beauty about Veeam’s portfolio is that the ticket size for Veeam sales can be from a few hundred dollars to a million dollars, which means that we are capable of addressing the back-up and availability challenges of not only small and medium sized businesses but also big enterprises. 

We cut across different verticals. The relevance of Veeam to address customer challenges is observed across every vertical that you can think of. From an Indian standpoint, we have a very large customer base. We have been in India for last 5 years now and we have large telcos, large service providers, banks, manufacturing, healthcare using our software. We are also seeing good traction in the government while also implementing Veeam software in many of the smart cities.  

Veeam offers wide ranging Availability solutions such as Backup & Replication, Disaster Recovery, Business continuity planning and Orchestration for the Always-On enterprise that help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting the current and future business goals of Veeam customers.” 

Shaun McLagan
Senior Vice President - Asia Pacific and Japan, 
Veeam Software

“India is critically important. We are a European company started out of Switzerland. Europe, Middle-East and Africa represent just under 50% of the total global revenue. Until a few years back or before my time at the company, I don’t think the APAC region got the focus and investment that it needed. When I joined the company, I created the Asia Pacific & Japan business and we added to it the SAARC region. I find an extremely talented, educated, skilled workforce here, who has got the enthusiasm to embrace technological change. So this region needs focus. We call the APJ the hyper-growth region. We have had customers in India who had been with us for 5-6 years. It is a critical region for us. 

As a privately held software company, we are open with our financial numbers and we do that on purpose. We have been profitable since Day 1. So we are seeing a shift globally in what’s next. If we see our tagline – Data Protection for What’s Next! What’s Next will be defined in terms of by the region, by the vertical. But in order to be ready to attack what’s next, you need money, because you need to burn a huge amount of cash in order to expand and grow. Adding $500 million investment from Insight Venture Partners with strong participation from strategic investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) will accelerate the next phase of Veeam’s growth as the No.1 provider of Data Management solutions for the public and private cloud. We have been successful focusing on data management platform and we will continue to do that. We did invest $150 Million in our R&D facility.” 

Belinda Jurisic
Channel Director, APJ 
Veeam Software

“Globally we have two programs at Veeam – ProPartner Resell Program, which is probably the most talked about. The Veeam ProPartner Program is designed to help partners take advantage of opportunities presented by the needs of the Hyper-Available Enterprise to grow  their business quicker and make it more profitable. Veeam's ProPartner Program will enable partners to provide exceptional service to customers while also securing their businesses and adding value. With this focus, Veeam can enable and empower its ProPartners across all market segments - from the small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) to the enterprise companies. 

The second program is the Cloud & Service Provider program. The program enables to maximize the partner’s addressable market by offering data protection services for any app, any data on any cloud  including workloads that run in hyperscale public clouds. And unlike other vendors in the space, we won’t compete with you. We bring the software, you bring the services.

Partners have played a very instrumental role whether it is for the enterprise sector, government or the SMB market. Take the example of India, some of the large India government accounts have been cracked only because of the partners. It is time for us to do a further investment and take it to the next level, in terms that earlier we were concentrated only on India as a market. But now we are trying to shift our focus to countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. By engaging with those partners and customers, we saw great success over there. There has been consistent business coming in from those countries, though they are of comparatively smaller value. These markets have surprised me, especially talking about India in terms of the innovations that we have seen here.”