Veeam's CEO has told IT Europa it is very much committed to growing business through its EMEA channel after the firm was bought by US private equity earlier this year, and the European headquarters of the business were moved to the US.
The vendor was forced to cancel its annual international VeeamON customer and partner event last month because of the pandemic (it would have taken place in Las Vegas this year), and instead held a virtual event this week. In a one-to-one web conference with IT Europa, Veeam CEO Bill Largent (pictured) said the company's new owners were currently considering acquisitions to help grow sales at the cloud data management firm, and that Veeam was aiming to quickly ramp up the number of cloud managed service providers it has on its books.
A big reason for the $5bn takeover by private equity giant Insight Partners (an existing investor) was to deliver more enterprise and federal US sales to the business, helped by moving the headquarters to the US from Switzerland and replacing the Russian owners of the company. Currently, half of the firm's $1.1bn in sales are generated in Europe, and the US is seen as an obvious big growth area.
Largent said: “We were getting questions from US federal agencies and US enterprise customers about our 'Russian ownership'. For me and the rest of the team there was no stigma attached, and those Russian owners had homes in the US.
“But there were questions and Insight decided to take control. There are huge channel opportunities for us as a 100% channel company. There are no plans for office closures in Europe and we are planning to increase our existing head counts in locations including Prague and Bucharest.”
Veeam achieved a global sales target of over $1bn through five years of continued high growth, after starting out as a traditional on-premise data backup software firm primarily targeting the SME market.
It now has tens of thousands of channel partners, ranging from traditional resellers to managed service providers and some of the world's leading cloud service providers and technology vendors servicing the needs of the hybrid cloud market.
Despite this, Largent admits that some potential customers still see the firm as an SMB player, not the increasingly important enterprise player it is evolving into thanks to its cloud business.
“With the cloud and the cloud-based products we have launched at this virtual VeeamON, we are targeting big cloud growth and quicker roll-outs through our service provider channel, to help generate those much more valuable recurring revenues,” said Largent.
He acknowledges that the company is in a big ongoing battle with more established players at one end, like Veritas and Commvault, and newer kids on the block like Acronis (itself making moves to rapidly scale up its enterprise business from its SMB beginnings).
Largent said Insight would not rule anything out when it comes to potential M&A deals involving known players, but said it was more likely Insight would look to what VMware has recently done to grow specific new areas of business. The virtualisation and cloud orchestration firm has grown these new sales by acquiring some unknown companies for relatively small amounts of bucks, and has hung a new hat on those businesses to help carve out a niche for itself.
Largent said: “Yes, this recent VMware model may well be the route we go down in the first instance to help grow, but who knows what could happen further down the line when it comes to market rivals.”
On the performance of the company this year, Largent admitted that sales could be affected overall by the pandemic when it came to the annual results, but he maintained Veeam was still targeting record revenue for the calendar year of $1.2bn when it came to contract value. Largent said that in both quarter one (up to March) and in quarter two there had been no downturn in business, and that the switch to remote working across the company to support partners and customers had been an “easy migration”.
As for the product updates announced at VeeamON, Largent agreed with IT Europa's assessment that they could be seen as “incremental improvements”, while firming up the vendor's position in growth areas.
Its launches included Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) v3, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5 that includes full support for Microsoft Teams, and the general availability of Veeam Backup for AWS v2.
