New strategy for Veeam

Veeam Software, the leading mid-range backup solution for server virtualization, recently made a pretty big announcement around cloud and data management. In fact, the company reacts to the market pressure and especially the one coming from Rubrik and on the other side the omnipresence of AWS. Veeam wishes to be seen now as an Intelligent Data Management company not limited to backup for SMB but it won't be easy to move that image, release new product and change sales behaviors.

The company announced a new iteration of the Veeam Availibility Platform (VAP) that is composed of 3 products: Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 and the upcoming Veeam Availability for AWS and Veeam Availability Console v3. Topics around this announce are cost effective data retention, easy cloud migration and data mobility, cloud-native backup and protection for AWS, portable cloud-ready licensing, increased security and data governance, and solutions to make it easier than ever for service providers to deliver Veeam-powered services to market (as written in the PR).

As mentioned above VAP groups several distinct products: Backup & Replication (BR) and Availability Suite. The suite groups itself BR and ONE for monitoring and reporting. The announcement is about:

• Availability Suite with Cloud Tier supporting AWS S3, Azure Blog Storage, IBM COS and S3 compatible platforms such Cloudian, Minio, SwiftStack..., Cloud Mobility to migrate, move and recover any on-premises or cloud-based workloads to AWS, Azure and Azure Stack, DataLabs for testing security and compliance challenges such GDPR.
• Availability for AWS combines N2WS cloud-native backup and recovery of AWS workloads, with agent-less backup leveraging AWS snapshots, backup AWS and on-premises applications on S3 and instant recovery of AWS EC2 to boost RTOs.
• Instance licensing with license migration between locations following the move of the application.
• Availability Console v3, Universal APIs for products integration with hypervisor, storage and applications partners and support of Microsoft Office365 as a starter.

First remark, the terrible name around one product Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4. What product people are doing at Veeam? This announcement would have deserved probably a 10 release number and not something like a patch, a third digit...

In the image above, container vendors names are missing, no presence of Docker or Kubernetes, not a good sign as today it represents a hot category. A second miss is GCP and as the company promotes multi-cloud, it's a real problem.

Veeam who tried for several years to mimic Veritas has a long run to do as several products and technologies are missing in its product portfolio. Don't assume Veritas is just backup, it's also about data and storage management as Veritas is recognized for its file system, volume manager and clustering solutions and more recently for SaaS Backup, multi-cloud data management. What is true is the Symantec period where the security company finally has frozen Veritas development and it was a clear fact when Veritas has been spun-off. Even an object storage product was absent of the Veritas portfolio, what a miss at that time. We really hope to learn more on this strategy and even know some acquisitions for the VeeamON conference in May in Miami.