"Our goal this year is to do half a billion dollars in revenue bookings, and to achieve one billion by the end of 2018," said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam Software, CEO.
Lofty ambitions for the CEO, who talked exclusively to CBR during the VeeamON Forum in London on June 11.
The CEO said the company is "gradually expanding our addressable market. We believe we will be one of the vendors that actually create a market. We have 145,000 customers today and adding four thousand every month.
"Going back to all these customers and offering them backup and replication, the foundation for disaster recovery in the cloud, is a second revenue stream for our partners and ourselves".
Explaining the future focus of Veeam, Timashev said: "We are much more interested in enterprise customers today."
Fundamental tech for the modern DC
Going back to the company’s roots, Timashev spoke of the initial 2006 launch and the company’s ambition to develop different tools for VMware administrators. In 2008 it released the Veeam Backup & Replication solution.
Timashev said: "We combined two data protection techniques in one product, which is only possible with virtualisation. Then we realised that this was the area we wanted to focus on.
"Since day one we’ve been 100% channel, only selling through the channel partners who understand the value of the modern data centre, and what virtualisation, cloud and modern storage bring to the data centre."
Timashev believes that virtualisation, cloud and modern storage are the three fundamental technologies the modern data centre is based on and its "solution takes full advantage of these technologies".
Crowded market
Talking legacy, Timashev said that its competitor’s solutions, including those of large companies like IBM, EMC and Symantec, are old having initially been developed 15 years ago.
He said: "This place is too crowded. Veeam does not have this luggage, which allows us to create something innovative.
On average, 60% to 70% of infrastructure in Europe is virtualised, a number that in the next three to five years will be 90%, according to Timashev.
He said: "That is our strategy. We will continue to innovate for the modern data centre, this is a new industry and we have done a lot of innovative things that were a first in the industry.
"Many things that our competitors are trying to copy – imitators – but they are not as good as we are."
Following from this, the CEO recognised that these competitors have a good relationship at the CEO level, which sometimes leads large enterprises to go with the legacy solutions.
He added: "But if the decision is made by the IT director, who’s responsible for the modern data centre, he or she understands that Veeam is the way to go for the modern data centre."
Backup 360 degrees turn
Backup requirements have "dramatically changed in the last five to seven years", according to Timashev.
He explained that backup products were designed 20 years ago with the mentality being that customers would capture data once a day.
Timashev added: "If something happens with a server, users can lose 24 hours of data. In the physical world, customers have to buy a new server to have a spare one, and then they have to install the system, deploy the applications and others, making the process more expensive and also taking longer."
With modern technologies, Veeam can condense the process to minutes and seconds, and backup data every five to ten minutes, according to the CEO.
He said: "Seven years ago, only 5% of applications were mission critical. For 95% of applications people used backup, and for 5% they used high availability.
"In the modern world, 50% to 100% of applications are mission critical. Customers don’t need to backup; they need availability for all their applications."
