Veeam also made some product announcements on the first day of their event, notably the addition of support for a fourth hypervisor, Red Hat Virtualization.

Today, on the first day of the second virtualized VeeamON event, the company provided an outline of its vision and strategy for the year ahead, building on the momentum over the last year. They also announced support for the RHV [Red Hat Virtualization] hypervisor, and did demos of some recently released and about-to-be released versions of core products.

“We have 36,000 customers and partners registered at this event,” said Bill Largent, Veeam’s CEO. “We are now number two in global market share from a revenue perspective, and plan to move to number one within a year or so.”

“Last year we had 22% year-over-year growth, and in Q1 of this year, 25% growth,” said Danny Allan, Veeam’s CTO and SVP Product Strategy. “It’s a rocket ship propelled by cloud and SaaS.”

Allan noted that since last year’s VeeamON event, the company has had 17 product releases.

“That’s the fastest pace in our history,” he said. “We released Veeam Backup and Replication v11 earlier in the year, and have 130,000 downloads already without promoting it to customers. Usually, we take a month or two to send out the e-cards. We weren’t even in the cloud marketplace 18 months ago. Since then, we have iterated six times, and have three more releases in the next three months.”

Allan also stated that Veeam has a massive Go-to-Market through their 10,000 Cloud Service Provider partners around the world, of which about a third of revenues come from selling to the Gold and Platinum partners’ market, a third from the mid-market and a third from the lower part of the market. He noted as well that Veeam recently surpassed 1 million active installs of the product, which includes the Community Edition

Allan noted that one of his favorite quotes, from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella early last year, is already obsolete.

“His quote that they have seen two years of digital transformation in the past two months because of the pandemic is now dated,” he said. “We have now seen a decade’s growth of digital transformation in the last year.

That has led to Veeam doubling down in the last year on the most modern aspects of backup, including Kubernetes and Office 365.

“It’s also not just backup,” Allan said. “One of the big things we have seen is growth around cloud mobility. The way we store data is entirely portable, so customers can back up workloads in one place and recover it somewhere else. That’s been a huge driver for us.”

One new product announcement – really an expansion of support – is that Veeam will be adding a fourth supported hypervisor to their portfolio, Red Hat Virtualization [RHV], which joins VMware, Microsoft and Nutanix.

“RHV, like Nutanix, is a variant of KVM, so we are taking what we have learned from Nutanix and applying it to RHV,” Allan noted. “RHV is being used more in some geos and some verticals so it only made sense to add a fourth hypervisor to the mix. This is coming in the summer of 2021.”

Anton Gostev, Veeam’s SVP Product Management announced, at a very high level, what Veeam customers can expect to see in the short term.

“The first and biggest thing is object storage, he said. “We are seeing incredible adoption of object storage, which most customers still back up on-prem. Security and improving data management operations are the other big themes. You will hear more this fall about these, once we reach the beta stage.”

Coming much sooner, and previewed in a keynote later on Tuesday, were several other new versions of solutions which were just released, or are about to be released.

“Coming soon is Veam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v 6,” Allan said. “New self-service capabilities enable users to be self-sufficient and frees IT time since they don’t have to respond to tickets. We are also demoing tiering into colder tiers of storage.”

Veeam Backup for AWS v 4, is another that is coming soon. Veeam DR Orchestrator V 4, which is generally available now, and the recently announced Veeam repository integration for Kasten K10 for Kubernetes were also highlighted.

“We are putting a focus on where the industry is going,” Allan said.  “We are now going through the next big decade of transformation, which we believe  is based on containers. They are designed for consumption economics, and can be provisioned and deprovisioned in real time, which is ideal for the  ephemeral consumption-based model of the cloud. It’s why I’m so excited about our acquisition of Kasten, which I would argue is number one in the entire industry for Kubernetes backup.”