LAS VEGAS – On Tuesday, Veeam kicked off their VeeamON 2022 event here with their first big live show in front of customers, partners and employees since 2019, around 10,000 in all. It was supplemented by a further 35,000 people who registered for the event online. While the big product roadmap news is being announced on Wednesday, on Tuesday, the company did update their strategic vision, and issued a large-scale new report on ransomware and its impact.

Anand Eswaran, who became Veeam’s fifth CEO six months ago, coming from RingCentral following a longer tenure at Microsoft, said that Veeam’s success reflected key core values in which he strongly believed himself.

“One is the importance of an engineering-driven culture, an innovation driven culture,” Eswaran said. The other, paraphrasing Satya Nadella when he took over at Microsoft, was the importance of being a ‘learn it all,’ not a ‘know it all.’

“Our million is to help you secure all backup and recovery data anywhere in the hybrid cloud,” Eswaran told his audience. “It starts by protecting you from ransomware. Then we foster cloud acceleration, allowing you to move to the cloud at your place. Finally, we focus on modernizing backup. Eswaran noted that while Veeam started out in virtual backup, today they also protect public clouds, Kubernetes, Saas and physical workloads.

“We are and have always been about taking backup to the next level,” he stressed.

“When I joined Veeam five years ago we were #5 worldwide in the second half of 2021, according to IDC” said Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam. Now we are tied statistically for first in the worldwide data replication and protection DR&P] market.” There are a couple wrinkles in the data. Veeam is actually behind Dell EMC slightly in revenue. On the other hand, Veeam has been posting strong momentum in the market, leading it in growth. Dell EMC, on the other hand, has been losing market share to competitors.

Allan also emphasized Veeam’s focus on conversion of customers to a subscription model.

“We will never be all subscription because some geos need the perpetual licensing of Veeam universal licensing,” he said. But we did see a 78% growth of subscription business in Q1.” This complemented a 25% ARR growth YOY.

Allan emphasized that while Veeam in 2022 is about much more than backup, that is still the core of their business.

“Our focus is to be the most trusted provider of backup solutions that delivers modern data protection,” he said.

This strategy revolves around three specific things.

“The first is ransomware attacks, where 94% try to delete the backup,” Allan indicated.

“The second is a focus on cloud accelerations,” he said. “Kubernetes didn’t take over everything, which has made things more diverse and more complicated. There are greenfields apps and new ones being designed that need modern data protection.”

Third is the need for Veeam not to rest on its laurels and to continue to be a backup innovator if it is to continue to grow as it has been doing.

“Modernizing of backup has always been core, since Day One of the company, when we began from the premise that traditional backup did not fit in the virtual hypervisor world,” Allan stated. “The backup needed to be at the hypervisor level. From there we moved the focus to taking an image of backup in the storage array.”

Allan said that while the main focus is still backup, there is now a lot of focus on Disaster Recovery orchestration capabilities.

“We have 1 million active applications, many on prem, and over a billion in business through our BaaS and DRaaS providers,” he emphasized.

“We have also been doubling down on deepening the platform and broadening it, with Kasten and Kubernetes, and Backup for Salesforce,” he said.

Finally, Allan highlighted three Veeam areas of product innovation he did not believe has been getting enough messaging.

“The first is that Veeam Backup for Office 365 has over 11 million paid users,” he said.

“The second is Veeam One, which I see as the hidden gem of the Veeam portfolio,” Allan noted. “It tells you what’s protected, what’s not protected, and what’s immutable, and helps the customer learn when they will have issues with AI.”

The third of these underappreciated solutions is Veeam Disaster Recovery Coordinator.

Allan concluded by saying that he considers their biggest challenge to be customers who are happy to continue doing things as they have done them in the past, whether with a rival vendor or with Veeam.

“Our goal is to get the market to understand that they cannot afford to do nothing,” he stressed.