MIAMI — Veeam kicked off its annual VeeamOn user and partner conference here Tuesday, introducing version 6.0 of its Kasten V10 data protection offering for Kubernetes container environments.

Since acquiring its previous partner Kasten in the fall of 2020, the company has released 68 iterations of the platform, said Veeam CTO Danny Allan.

Today’s release is a boost for the company’s central message of the Veeam Data Platform, as it brings Kasten integration to the VDP, Veeam’s overall platform for backing up, recovering, securing and migrating data across all of the different technologies it supports, from its historical stronghold of virtual machines to physical infrastructure, to public cloud storage, and now to Kubernetes.

Veeam promotes the release as delivering improvements on scalability and efficiency and supporting more container environments, ranging from Red Hat OpenShift and VMware’s Tanzu to Cisco’s Hybrid Cloud CVD. It also adds new storage options, including NetApp and Dell-EMC varieties of Amazon S3 support.

The launch comes as Veeam reports Kubernetes is moving from a technology used in test and development environments to one increasingly common in production.

“It’s only been in the last 18 months we’ve seen mission-critical workloads going into production and then needing protection,” John Jester, chief revenue officer at Veeam, told partners. “It’s a big opportunity.”

Likewise, CEO Anand Eswaran told partners that while “every company” looks at containers and a DevOps methodology, “very few have a protection plan around containers.”

“It’s a great opportunity for you to be in there ahead of the game,” Eswaran said.

Shiva Pillay, senior vice president and general manager of the Americas for Veeam, said the Kubernetes opportunity might require building new channel connections. Partners in the Red Hat OpenShift community would seem to be a logical fit. But, he added, as Kubernetes becomes more mainstream in the customer base, he expects to see container technology skillsets becoming more mainstream in the channel.

“Now, as you get out to production, we’re seeing a lot of customers coming to us. They’re calling us a little late in the process, saying they didn’t realize they needed a backup strategy, but they need one now. That’s got partners excited,” Pillay said.

He suggested that as containers become more of a production-ready technology, it would make sense for data protection-focused Veeam partners to forge connections with partners deeper in the DevOps space or to build skills around DevOps themselves.

“It’s a future trend, but it’s something that’s becoming, from a revenues perspective, more real,” Pillay said.

One of Veeam’s major talking points for partners at this year’s VeeamOn event is around the cross-selling opportunity for partners, the familiar “sell the whole portfolio” message so familiar to most solution providers. And with the opportunity around Kubernetes, as a production container system grows, it’s another new avenue for partners to explore with their existing customers, along with recent expansions by Veeam in the cloud space and in providing data management around Salesforce.