News

Little Overlap in N2WS, Veeam Buyers, Even at the Same Customer

• By Scott Bekker
• 05/15/2018

Executives from Veeam Software are surprisingly excited that Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrators haven't heard of their company.

Veeam bought AWS backup and recovery specialist N2WS in January of this year. The all-cash purchase of the provider of cloud-native enterprise backup and recovery for AWS was Veeam's first acquisition in 10 years.

In an executive roundtable from the stage at the VeeamOn 2018 conference happening this week in Chicago, Co-CEO and President Peter McKay set the scene from one of the company's booths at another recent conference, where AWS administrators were standing three-deep to learn about N2WS.

"We're hearing the name of all of our customers, and they didn't know who we were," McKay said, referring to the customers who were interested in N2WS but also worked for customers who were major Veeam customers.

The reason that lack of name recognition excited McKay is because Veeam bought N2WS partly on a theory about the state of the market.

"This cloud world is a different buyer," McKay said.

Added co-panelist and Veeam Co-Founder Ratmir Timashev of N2WS, "They're targeting a slightly different buyer, they are targeting the AWS buyer. If we are selling to a centralized IT person, N2WS technology will be part of our solution. In a couple of years, this AWS admin will become part of the central IT."

Timashev said N2WS is to the Amazon backup world what Veeam was to the VMware virtual world 10 years ago.

"We won the first battle in the new modern datacenter. The next battle for the next five years is going to be multi-cloud," Timashev said. The purchase of N2WS, he said, "is a strategic move for us and it shows our intent to dominate these other markets. It's very important to build native solutions for AWS, native to Azure, native to IBM. In the same way we built a native solution for VMware, that we are building native solutions for those markets."

At VeeamOn, the company is rolling out a new branding to reach a larger total addressable market. The company is moving from its recent tagline of "availability for the always-on enterprise" to "intelligent data management for the hyper-available enterprise."

McKay walked partners through a simplified Veeam history in his keynote, saying the company was about virtual machine backup from its founding in 2006, recovery in 2010, availability last year, and hyper-availability now. He defined hyper-availability as the need to protect and make available data that is critical to the business, growing exponentially and sprawling across locations that include physical datacenters, virtual datacenters, public clouds and SaaS applications.

In late April, Veeam announced that the first quarter of 2018 was its 39th straight quarter of record bookings growth. The company claimed 21 percent growth year-over-year and said it was on track to become a $1 billion company (by revenues) in 2018. In a graphic shown to partners earlier in the day, Veeam told partners it was a $200 million company in 2012, was on track to hit $1.1 billion in 2018, and was aiming for $1.5 billion in 2020.

The company also said N2WS has had 100 percent growth in installed trials since the acquisition. As part of the conference, the N2WS unit announced immediate availability of version 2.3 of Cloud Protection Manager. Major new features include automated backup and recovery operations for Amazon DynamoDB.

Pictured: Veeam President Peter McKay.