Ken Ringdahl explains the firm’s focus on flexibility as it moves into a multi-cloud world
Elly Yates-Roberts |
What is Veeam’s role in the field of data protection?
Veeam started in the on-premises sector, developing the next-generation data centre from a virtualisation perspective. Since then, we’ve added support for physical workloads and expanded to the cloud. That’s been an evolution for Veeam and that’s because our customers have taken us along that journey. What’s important to us is being the stewards to their data, giving them the power and ability to not only protect but recover their data.
How is Veeam different from its competitors?
What makes Veeam unique is we’re a true independent software vendor (ISV). We do not ship a piece of hardware. We want to really embrace our partner ecosystem, leveraging our partners such as Microsoft to bring solutions to market together. We do not lock you into any hardware or platform, as flexibility is a core foundational principle and value that we believe our customers want.
What is your vision for the future of data management?
We want to move along with our customers, in terms of modernising their infrastructure, providing better support for their needs and driving their costs down. Something people have been asking for us for years is the ability to mine our back-up. When Veeam is in a customer’s environment, we have all their data, a resource onto which you can’t place a value. So, we’re going to give people the ability to mine that data and build solutions on top of what we have by giving them access to Veeam back-up. The Veeam back-up format is proprietary, but we’re going to open that up to other partners who can do data classification or analytics on that data. Our strategy going forward is to continue to provide opportunities for our customers and partners to add value onto the platform overall.
Broader than that is the multi-cloud journey we’re currently on, recognising that our customers are asking for broad, hybrid cloud support. They’re using best of breed workloads in different places, whether that be in Microsoft Azure or their own private clouds. We’re moving along their journey, providing them with the utmost reliability and robustness. At the end of the day, we are their availability when they have an issue with their primary infrastructure, we are who they lean on. Providing that peace of mind when they need to recover their environment is, and will always remain, our number one priority.
This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.