VeeamON Auckland - How does the big data contender fit into NZ?
VeeamON Auckland was held last week in Auckland's Shed 10 with a mass of attendees looking to hear about the latest offerings and numbers from the seemingly unstoppable data management provider.
APJ senior vice president Shaun McLagan begins his talk by bringing up a moment in Auckland's history that will be embedded in the memory of anyone who lived in New Zealand's centre of industry in 1998 - the five-week-long power crisis.
For a company that made its name on backup and recovery, this is a smart bruise to press on - a reminder that not only earthquakes and floods can cause businesses to lose out.
This esoteric piece of knowledge about New Zealand's history also serves another purpose - to highlight McLagan's point that Veeam is investing, and will continue to invest in the region with people, support and technology, all in a thoughtful way.
And it's easy to understand why it does.
Veeam's latest offering is an update to its Office 365 backup solution, expanding it to include SharePoint and OneDrive, and New Zealand has one of the highest rates of Office 365 adoption in the world.
One theme that comes through from McLagan is that for Kiwis, Veeam is a safe bet, but I think it is fair to say that for Veeam, Kiwis are a safe bet, too.
"Investment in Veeam is an investment in trust," McLagan says.
"We have 300,000 customers globally who are putting their faith in Veeam to enable them to deliver hyper-availability to their enterprises. We continue to grow, to focus, to invest for success.
McLagan outlines how Veeam grew over 36% last year in a market that analysts suggest is growing 6-7%, that it adds a net average of 4000 new customers a month, its Net Promoter Score of 76, and that it is heading towards the coveted $1 billion mark.
In ANZ alone the company now has 10,000 customers, 2,000 of whom are on our little archipelago.
It does come across as a bit of hard-earned corporate bragging but that is not the only reason he brings up these stats.
"When making the decision to move forward with an organisation I want to make sure that you're comfortable that this is a less risky play," he explains.
"We're going to continue to be around. We've made investments and acquisitions in technology and we continue to grow.
Veeam enterprise strategy vice president Dave Russell then takes the stage to talk product.
Russell's previous life was as a distinguished analyst for Gartner and the author of the storage Magic Quadrant from 2006-2017, and he speaks with distinct passion.
He describes how six years ago the basic challenges of data had not really changed in decades but today, the rate of growth, value and scale have meant that the cost, capability and complexity requirements have sky-rocketed.
He steps the audience through the five stages of data management, from backup and recovery to automation and everything in between, and talks about how Veeam's platform is designed from the ground up to allow as wide a range of use-cases as possible with its open API approach.
As Veeam moves deeper into the enterprise space, its engineers are tackling challenges head-on and openly, working with their many strategic partners to provide solutions that have the proactive, scalable and intelligent capabilities that the enterprise market needs.
