Veeam pushes subscription licensing in cloud-centric ‘Act II’

Backup specialist Veeam’s “Act II” – heralded by its $5bn acquisition by investor Insight Partners last month – will see a sharp focus on the cloud. That’s according to Veeam CTO Danny Allan, who spoke to Computer Weekly this week.

Core to this will be a transition to a subscription pricing model, said Allan. “Most of our customers have been on a perpetual licensing model, but this will change so that customers can pay for what they need, but based on time periods also,” he said.

So, for example, a customer with a cloud-based project set to last six months could opt for subscription payment for that period.

There will be no compulsion to move to subscription licensing, said Allan, with the choice left to the customer to decide on what suits their deployment.

“If the customer operates on-premise and wants to continue with a perpetual per-socket licensing model, they can do,” he said. “But if they want to pay on a subscription basis, they can do. We won’t push them towards it.”

As for cost, Allan said: “On the Veeam side, it is equivalent. What it depends on is whether the organisation wants to move to the cloud. If it’s a 24/365 workload, it’d probably be better off on-premise. The cloud is not a charity.”

The Veeam CTO set out three steps into cloud working that customers are likely to take. First would be use of the cloud as storage for its backups. Second is the ability to use Veeam in the cloud to protect data there.

Finally, said Allan, the company had “solved at a technical level” the ability to move data between clouds, but implementation depends on the customer having a subscription with the cloud provider.

“You can right-click to recover to any cloud service,” he said. “We store data in a very portable format.”

Allan believes the cloud is just beginning to really become mainstream and Veeam’s focus will be on success in that area.

“In Act II, the focus is on the cloud,” he said. “We believe it takes a decade for a technology to get into its stride. While cloud has been with us for about a decade, it’s only now beginning to really move. So, our focus in the next few years will be on winning in the cloud data arena.”

Allan said he hoped the move to being a US-headquartered company would see Veeam become number one in the data protection market there, because that is where the big three cloud providers are based. It will also be helped by the company’s ability to bid for US government contracts, which is couldn’t previously.

Veeam’s flagship product is its Availability Suite. It also makes Backup for Office 365 in the cloud space.

The company made its name as a provider of backup software for virtual servers when the virtualisation revolution swept datacentres. It has since become a market leader among backup providers.

Last month, the company was bought by Insight Partners for $5bn in a move that will see the departure of its Russian founders, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov.