Co-CEO Peter McKay Leaving Veeam In Executive Restructuring

Veeam Software Co-CEO and President Peter McKay is leaving the company amid a broad shakeup of the fast-growing firm's executive team.

McKay was at Veeam for a little over three years and had been co-CEO, president and a member of the Baar, Switzerland-based company's board of directors since July 2016. He said in a tweet today that his time at the data availability software firm was "one of the most satisfying periods of my career."

Today marks the end of one of the most satisfying periods of my career
I sincerely thank those who have supported me and have been part of the teams I have led Your contribution continues to humble me Thank you for all your support

— Peter C. McKay (@PeterCMcKay) October 30, 2018

Veeam grew rapidly under McKay, boasting more than three straight years of double-digit quarterly growth. McKay announced the integration of Veeam's High Availability platform with Cisco's HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure solution in late August.

McKay also drove Veeam's effort to respond to a data breach in one of its databases last month.

The restructuring makes company co-founder and co-CEO Andrei Baronov the company’s sole CEO and co-founder Ratmir Timashev executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. Timashev was sole CEO before McKay was hired. Board member William Largent was made executive vice president of operations.

CRN reached out to McKay for comment, but had not heard back from him at press time.

Veeam partners Tuesday said they benefited from the growth that McKay created while at the helm, and added that they're confident the trend will continue thanks to the stability in the company's leadership ranks.

Matt Chesterton, CEO of OffSiteDataSync, one of Veeam's largest cloud service provider partners, said that under McKay's leadership, OffSite grew from nearly zero VMs protected to 37,000 today. OffSite did that with an annual growth rate of 178 percent, and Chesterton expects that to continue.

"We know we've been growing faster than any other provider, and I attribute a lot of that to Peter and his leadership," Chesterton said. "He follows through. He says he's going to double-down, and they do with marketing resources, technical expertise."

Chesterton said he expects the growth and follow-through to continue as long as co-founders Baronov and Timashev remain. "I have a level of confidence with Andrei staying in place, and Ratmir," Chesterton said. "The leadership is still strong. What Peter did was drive cloud, multi-cloud adoption and take the company from No. 8 on the list of availability providers to soon-to-be No. 3. He's done a terrific job."

Dante Orsini, senior vice president of business development at cloud service provider and Veeam partner iland, said Veeam's leadership team is strong enough and sufficiently committed to partners that McKay's departure will not negatively impact it.

"Ratmir has always remained in control from a certain perspective, so this doesn't shake us at all," Orsini said. "[Ratmir] is so intimate with the customer base and the partner base and so committed to the partner community that this doesn't shake our confidence at all."

"Peter has done a lot for the company in focusing them on the enterprise space, and they're starting to see the benefits of that," Orsini said. "We run into customers every day who are absolutely pleased to work with Veeam. They are an all-star from a channel perspective."