Back up a minute: Private equity outfit coughs $5bn for Veeam Insight Partners – the same private equity house that pumped half a billion dollars into data protection powerhouse Veeam Software earlier this year – is acquiring the firm for an estimated $5bn. Veeam, founded and owned by Russian techies Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev, is currently based in Switzerland, but will now …
I inherited a Veeam installation when I took over at a new company and, coming from years of horrible backup software - I'm looking at you Symantec - can't believe just how smooth, seamless and - gasp - enjoyable backup can actually be. Now this old cynic knows what evangelism is.
Roadmaps are always subject to change, you cannot definitely say this statement unless you were the CEO of the acquiring company.. New owners almost always are looking to recoup investments. Whether that be layoffs, product development and/or licensing changes. This is the norm in the industry.
In all cases, where an investment group acquires a company; it's about maximizing profits. Sure it may not be this year... But next? Who knows. Short term, it's most likely business as usual. But I'd expect pricing changes for new sales over time. Certain maintenance contracts going up in price, and perhaps some cross vendor agreements/partnerships reduced or expanded.
More importantly, where Veeam relied on SP's and VAR's to do a lot of lifting; we could see Veeam bolstering their own sales teams to break more into enterprise accounts. Something that haven't really done historically, due to their inability to scale into the 100's of TB's of data to protect, without some massive server/storage infrastructure. Yes SP's use them, but they are often single dedicated installs per customer! That is not "enterprise."
Personally, I find software exciting when it makes you look like a hero. We hear stories all the time about how Veeam was able to recover multi TB sized critical databases in just minutes, or helping customers transition workloads from VMware to cloud native AWS and Azure workloads. Veeam's "Veeam ONE" analytics tool is out there saving companies millions. Yes backups should be boring and always "just work". That's a given with Veeam, there's so much more beyond the surface.
The few MSP/SP's I've worked with... Veeam was installed in "pods." Meaning each customer got their own dedicated Veeam server, often a VM, writing to a DAS or large scale NAS. Never have I run into a single enterprise large scale veeam deployment measured in the thousands of VM's with hundreds of TBs of data being protected.
While many SP's mirror that of an "enterprise," veeam isn't deployed as such. I've seen asigra deployed as such. Even Netbackup and commvault in rare cases.
I use Veeam, it works reliably. I hope this acquisition doesn't turn it into a money-grubbing clusterfuck like so many other acquisitions have. Or, <deity> forbid, Insight Partners decides to sell it on to Microsoft/Oracle/VMWare/Dell a year from now... because that never happens, right? right?
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