Veeam is also announcing a free 50-seat version of the native backup application for Salesforce, and indicated that a couple more product-specific like this one and an earlier one for Microsoft 365 are on the roadmap.
Veeam has announced that its new Veeam Backup for Salesforce, which went to General Availability on October 27, is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Veeam thinks that the AppExchange listing will greatly stimulate their Salesforce business, because it’s something that the market looks to for validation. Veeam also announced the availability for a free version of this solution, Veeam Backup for Salesforce Community Edition. It provides a fully functional free backup and recovery of Salesforce data for organizations with 50 Salesforce user licenses or less.
“It’s one of those things that in the AppExchange, the product has to be out first,” said Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam. “If I’m a Salesforce person, I want to see it in the App Exchange, along with pricing and supportability details. We had been working on AppExchange from the beginning with Salesforce because it provides the credibility that customers need.”
Veeam Backup for Salesforce is a Salesforce-native offering that lets organizations deploy a backup environment either on-prem or in the cloud, providing access and control of Salesforce data and metadata. It facilitates granular and bulk data recovery of Salesforce records, hierarchies, fields, files and metadata, eliminates the risk of losing this data and metadata due to human error, integration issues or other data loss scenarios.
“There are some products in this area, but most Salesforce customers don’t back up their Salesforce data at all,” Vanover said, noting the commonality there with Microsoft 365, which was their first app-specific solution. “We originally built our own product for Salesforce because we used it ourselves and there were shortcomings with the existing solutions. That’s the biggest part of the market that we are going after with Veeam Backup for Salesforce, environments where the Salesforce data isn’t being backed up at all.”
While Veeam Backup for Salesforce is a backup for a SaaS product, it is not itself a Backup as a Service for SaaS [BaaS] offering. Accordingly, it will be sold through their large channel of partners.
“Salesforce has a very different ecosystem than we typically deal with, but partners have a natural ability to transact in this market,” Vanover stated. “Just buying it on the AppExchange won’t be enough for most customers. It’s also a great conversation starter for partners with their existing customer base, even though it is a new persona, and different from traditional backup.”
The MSRP is $36 per user per year, although Veeam is currently offering two 12-month introductory packages until the end of the year. One is for up to 300 users for $USD 2,000, while the other is unlimited users for $USD 10,000.
“It is reasonable in the future to expect service provider offers and licensing, although that’s not there yet,” Vanover said. “It will just be sold through the traditional channel, and we are laser-focused on the GSIs right now. We want to get it field-proven before service providers build offers around it.”
The free version, Veeam Backup for Salesforce Community Edition, is a fully functional version of the software, for organizations with 50 Salesforce user licenses or less. It is designed as a ‘try before you buy’ offering.
“The free version lets the channel ecosystem prove their point in their conversations around Salesforce,” Vanover said. “It’s fully functional, and just has the limited amount of users.”
While Veeam Backup for Salesforce is the second Veeam app-specific solution, following Microsoft 365, it won’t be the last.
“There are at least two different projects under way for additional SaaS offerings,” Vanover stated. “This is one of the future directions of our Veeam portfolio.”
