Dan's Take

Veeam Talks Vision

The company points to the future while recognizing its limitations.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 05/19/2017

I've had the opportunity to speak with a few of Veeam's executives at VeeamON 2017, and wanted to offer a few thoughts based on what I've learned at the show.

I spoke with Danny Allan, Veeam's VP of Cloud and Alliances Strategy, and he laid out the company's vision.

• When Veeam talks about "always on" availability, it mean that it's focused on building a platform that will enable enterprises' "digital life." That is, it's hoping to help decouple the workloads from the underlying infrastructure.
• This vision is a work in progress. All datacenter systems, software and Windows and Linux workloads executing on physical systems, in either vSphere or Hyper-V-based virtual machines, and either on-premises or in the datacenter of a cloud service provider, is currently supported. Now that Veeam offers an API, the company is hoping that others, either vendors or the vendors' customers, will bring in other platforms.
• Veeam Availability Suite 10, Backup for Office 365 V1.5 and the Availability Console are all targeting availability, ease of use and simplicity.

I had a short, but very engaging, conversation with Scott Lillis, Veeam's VP of Systems Engineering. Here's what I learned:

• Veeam realizes that some of its messaging is a bit of an overreach. The company is hoping to present a vision of where it's going, rather than where it is now. This is a bit like Babe Ruth's pointing to the outfield before coming to bat. His gesture indicated where he was focusing; not that every swing would result in a home run.
• Veeam is investing heavily in development, but is cognizant of the fact that it can't do everything for everyone, everywhere, always. It has to focus on projects that will help a large segment of the IT industry, rather than doing things that are academically interesting, but won't pay their own way. He phrased it as, "Is the juice worth the squeeze?"