On February 4th, I caught a webinar with Veeam Software. The presentation was done by Veeam Northeast Senior System Engineer Scott Lillis. Scott did an excellent job with the Veeam overview and expertly handled the questions at the end. F3 Technology Partners and account manager Jim McDermott hosted this event and delivered the kick-off. F3 is a CT based IT consulting firm (HP, Sun, NetApp, VMware)

Veeam Software was founded in 2006 and boasts a strong line of VMware management products. They are best known for their backup & replication product and have expanded into other areas including management after they acquired nworks.

I remember exchanging a few emails with Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO , a few years back when they had either no presence or a very limited one in the U.S.

Veeam originally caught my attention with VMware Visio stencils and FastSCP, both of which are free products. There aren’t too many companies that have been able to leverage free products, however these guys have done so and they seem to be on fire. There are more than 100,000 users of FastSCP.

A somewhat interesting side note is that Timashev sold his company, Aelita, to Quest Software in 2004. Veeam’s main rival is Vizioncore whose parent company is Quest Software.

Veeam has had a few technology firsts in recent years – for example the first backup tool to work with Vmware’s free ESX hypervisor. Veeam is expected to begin to start supporting Microsoft’s Hyper-V

They had very early of support vSphere and vStorage and I found that their Smart DeDupe.

One slide included a few quotes from the Veeam Community forums:

“That’s right… 15 minutes… 670GB… insane!”
“Not only does Veeam Backup 4.0 compress this VM to 1/4 of the size but also in half the time “

In December of 2009 with Version 4.1, they announced support to Replicate to ESXi and support for CBT with vRDM disks.

With nworks , they are able to manage and monitor both physical and virtual servers & applications.

Veeam claims over 10,000 customers and say that they are adding over 600 new customers per month.

While Vizioncore continues to be the virtualization volume king in this space, Veeam is gaining ground. It seems that we have two excellent companies with Vizioncore and Veeam; their challenge is managing a large portfolio of products, integrating and leveraging products from recent acquisitions , competing with single product specialist companies such as Akorri & DynamicOps and the hypervisor OEMs themselves. So far both of them have proven to be nimble enough to do this and to continue to grow.