Veeam to continue growth momentum in APAC

Veeam expects to close the year on a high in the Asia-Pacific region with double-digit growth as more companies look to protect the growing number of cloud-based workloads.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of VeeamOn 2022 in Las Vegas, Shiva Pillay, Veeam’s senior vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the company grew its annual recurring revenues in the region by 37% last year, a momentum that is expected to continue in 2022.

Pillay said Veeam will be looking to leverage its backup offerings to protect “strategic workloads” such as Microsoft 365 and VMware workloads running in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We see a lot of opportunities in the cloud space,” Pillay said, noting that more firms in the region have come to realise that operating in the cloud without an effective backup strategy can be complex and costly.

Pillay said Veeam is also seeing more business from service providers that are providing backup services for Microsoft 365, which its customers are consuming at a faster rate than before.

And with adoption of containers picking up across the region, demand for Veeam's Kasten K10 platform that protects Kubernetes workloads has also generated significant business opportunities.

“We are educating customers on how they go through the Kubernetes process, and we have a compelling story on why you need to back that up,” Pillay said. “Six months ago, customers were still dipping their toes in the space, but now we are starting to see that materialise in significant projects in South Korea, Thailand, Australia and India.”

Salesforce is the other strategic workload that Veeam is eyeing, with Veeam Backup for Salesforce expected to launch later this year. Pillay expects demand for the product in the region to be similar to that of Microsoft 365.

“It’s just another application that needs to be backed up and our story is that it's not backed up by the application or the vendor itself – it’s third-party vendors that give customers that safety and protection and moving that data from wherever they want,” he said.

Veeam Backup for Salesforce was built from Veeam’s in-house efforts to back up its own data on Salesforce. Showcasing the upcoming product on the second day of VeeamOn, Veeam executives demonstrated how data in Salesforce could be restored after a botched data update.

Anthony Spiteri, senior global technologist at Veeam, said: “Salesforce, to me, is going to sell regardless because everyone trusts us from the point of view of where we’ve come from.

“We led the market with Microsoft 365 backup, and we definitely can do the same with Salesforce. It’s a different customer persona we’re targeting but I think by virtue of the fact we’ve got all these customers, that’s going to be a very successful product for us.”

Veeam’s growing focus on protecting data in cloud-based applications does not come at the expense of its work in protecting on-premise workloads that many large enterprises continue to run in a hybrid cloud environment.

With the upcoming version 12 of the company’s flagship Veeam Backup and Replication suite, enterprises are able to failover an on-premise virtual machine to a public cloud service after automatically provisioning network resources, among other capabilities.

Christophe Bertrand, programme director at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “Our research shows that there are significant data protection disconnects – and therefore data loss risks – when it comes to cloud-resident data, applications, containerised services, and as-a-service platforms.

“That’s why this new release of Veeam V12 is significant:  it not only builds on their proven platform but expands the ability to reduce business risk through improved data and systems security recoverability at scale,” he added.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.