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Veeam Announces Free Windows Endpoint Backup Product

The company also unveiled Data Availability Suite v8, a major release of its flagship offering.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 10/08/2014

Veeam Software, known for its virtualization products, today announced a free backup and recovery offering for the non-virtualized. Aimed at the Windows desktop and laptop audience, it can be used on internal and external drives, a network-attached storage (NAS) device, or through a Veeam storage facility.

The move is a departure from the company's history of providing replication and backup and recovery software for virtual server environments. But its officials said the move is not a departure from focus, which will remain targeted on protection of server VMs; rather, they called it a realization that most organizations are not entirely virtual.

The new Veeam Endpoint Backup software will run on Windows 7 and later PCs. The company will issue a beta in the coming weeks, and the product is due to be officially released sometime next year. The announcement came on the closing day of its inaugural customer and partner conference, called VeeamON, held in Las Vegas.

Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst Jason Buffington, who follows the data protection market and has conducted research for Veeam, said offering endpoint client software was unexpected. "At first, I was a little surprised because it didn't seem congruent with that VM-centric approach to things," Buffington said. "But that's another great example of them adding a fringe utility. In this first release, while it's an endpoint solution, primarily, there's no reason you technically couldn't run it on a low-end Windows Server. I'm reasonably confident they are not going to go hog wild into the endpoint protection business. This is just their way to kind of test the code, test customers' willingness for it, as a way to vet that physical feature such that they have even a stronger stranglehold on that midsize org that's backing up everything except a few stragglers."

At a media briefing during the VeeamON conference, company officials emphasized that they remain focused on its core business of protecting server VMs as the company plots its growth toward supporting various cloud environments as backup and disaster recovery targets. Doug Hazelman, Veeam vice president of product strategy, indicated that it could be used for various physical servers, as well. Hazelman said that the company is largely looking to see how customers use the software, which can perform file-level recoveries. He added that the endpoint software doesn't require any Veeam software, and vowed it would remain free as a standalone offering.

"We are not targeting this at an enterprise with 50,000 endpoints," Hazelman said. "We want to get it in the hands of the IT pros and typical Veeam customers and see how we can expand this product and see how we can grow it."

The VeeamON event was largely to launch a major new release of its flagship suite, Veeam Availability Suite v8. In his opening keynote address in the partner track, CEO Ratmir Timashev said that Veeam is on place to post $500 million in booked revenue (non GAAP), and is aiming to double that to $1 billion by 2018.

In an interview following his keynote, Timashev said the company doesn't have near-term plans for an initial public offering (IPO), and insisted the company is not looking to be acquired. "We're not looking to sell the company," he said. "We believe we can grow. We have proven capabilities to find the next hot market, and develop a brilliant product and when you have this capability, you can continue growing, stay profitable and you don't need to sell."

Timashev added that Veeam can reach those fast-growth goals without deviating from its core mission of protecting virtual datacenters. Extending to a new network of cloud providers will be a key enabler, according to Timashev. The new Veeam Availability Suite v8, set to release next month, will incorporate a new interface called Cloud Connect that will let customers choose from a growing network of partners who are building cloud-based and hosted backup and disaster recovery services.

The new v8 suite offers a bevy of other features, including what it calls "Explorers" that can now protect Microsoft Active Directory and SQL Server, and extended support for Exchange Server and SharePoint. Also added is extended WAN acceleration introduced in the last release to cover replication, plus a feature called Backup IO, which adds intelligent load balancing.