Veeam Targets Commvault, Veritas As Enterprise Strategy Takes Shape

A rapidly changing backup market favors Veeam's 'hyper-availability' strategy, President Peter McKay says, and is helping the company win enterprise accounts away from larger competitors like Veritas, Commvault and Dell EMC's Avamar business.

Veeam is coming out swinging in its quest to win over the enterprise data availability market, and it's aiming its punches at several entrenched industry stalwarts whose pricing and technology leave them vulnerable, President and Co-CEO Peter McKay said.

A rapidly changing backup market favors Veeam's 'hyper-availability' strategy, McKay said, and is helping the Baar, Switzerland-based company win enterprise accounts away from larger competitors like Veritas, Commvault and Dell EMC's Avamar business.

"A lot of what we're doing is take-out," McKay said at the company's recent VeeamOn conference in Chicago. "For the price you're paying for maintenance on Veritas, or Commvault or Avamar, you can get a three-year deal with Veeam for less. That's virtual, physical and cloud for less than the price of maintenance."

[Related: CRN Interview: Veeam CEO McKay On Displacing Legacy BackUp Rivals And Doubling Down On Channel Relationships]

"If you bought something over the last three or four years, it's probably so much more expensive than you could ever get today," McKay said. "Customers want to cut that down so they can do more with these applications and these services that we're driving. We're seeing a massive shift of the old world to the new."

Don Foster, senior director of solutions marketing at Commvault, told CRN in a statement that Veeam will face challenges as it attempts to break into the enterprise data availability market. "As an established provider of enterprise data solutions for backup and recovery, disaster recovery, cloud and more, Commvault welcomes all market competition," Foster said. "Veeam is widely recognized as an SMB to mid-market solution and that is reflected heavily in their customer-base and portfolio of products. It will be challenging for them to successfully convince enterprise companies they can deliver on enterprise requirements while still satisfying current SMB customers."

Still, Chris Cappello, director of sales at Comport Technology Solutions, a Ramsey, N.J., solution provider that works with Veeam, said Veeam's commitment to the channel has allowed Comport to both push legacy vendors out of enterprise accounts and pull Veeam into markets where it hasn't played previously.

"Veeam has made the investment in the enterprise space," he said. "The story has always been that Veeam can't play there. Veeam is an SMB play. Really, in the last 18 months, they've made the investments there and we've been successful in our region displacing [competitors]."

"Veritas is recognized as the market leader in data protection and we are positioned like no other competitor in the world to help our customers solve their biggest data management challenges, from data protection and visibility to compliance readiness, business continuity and storage optimization," Veritas said in a statement to CRN. "We have a rich, global partner base of 9,000 active partners and an install base of 50,000+ customers, including 86 percent of the Fortune 500 who rely on Veritas every day to help them be successful on-premises and in complex multi-cloud environments."

Dell EMC did not respond to a request for comment before press time.

The combination of enterprise success and introducing Veeam into new markets has made Veeam Comport's fastest-growing vendor, Cappello said. The company's Veeam business, he said, is growing at a 200- to 300-percent annual clip.

"Sixty-five percent of Comport's business comes in the health care space, and that wasn't traditionally an area for Veeam," Cappello said. "Now we're really starting to bring it into those organizations side-by-side, and it's been great."

Comport is able to bring Veeam into a variety of environments, and that's a big part of what has made it such a successful part of the solution provider's portfolio.

"We've got customers that are doing on-premises solutions, and that's growing the perpetual license side of our portfolio, but we're doing the cloud side, as well, and we're growing in both those areas. It's been tremendous," Cappello said. You don't lose any capabilities if you want to keep things on premise or if you want to burst to some sort of cloud, whether it's with a Veeam Cloud Service Provider, or Azure, or Google, whatever it may be. It's an easier conversation than it was even a year or two ago."

Veeam is making an aggressive push into the enterprise and attempting to break out of its image as an SMB-focused vendor of data backup software. With its 'hyper-availability' strategy, the company is positioning itself as an enterprise-grade data availability option from traditional data centers to multi-cloud environments.

Solution providers working with Veeam stand to reap the benefits of customers' move toward adaptable data center technology as they move into their next refresh, McKay said. "That is a huge opportunity for the channel to take advantage of, to really optimize this refresh of data centers to this new world," McKay said. "It's not just Veeam software, it's the hardware. That's why Pure [Storage] and Nutanix are huge parts of this new refresh that's going on. All of these companies are looking at data center refresh as a huge part of their strategy, and it's all based on this new world around data and data intelligence."