At VeeamON 24 last week in Florida, the opening general session was kicked off by Tamecka McKay, chief information officer for the City of Fort Lauderdale, who touted the city as an economic hub with industries as diverse as aviation, technology, finance, marine, and tech — and no state tax. The city is also home to soccer phenom Lionel Messi.

After introducing Veeam Inc. Chief Executive Anand Eswaran (pictured), McKay discussed her current challenges and those she faced as CIO of the Broward County Public Schools — everything from 1,000-year floods to ransomware attacks.

“We have about 3,000 employees and 77 IT workers,” she said. “We have an extensive technology footprint. Most of our challenges can be summed up into three pillars: cybersecurity, modernization, and human capital.”

McKay’s opening remarks were about 15 minutes long and set the stage for the event. All CIOs today are under tremendous pressure with security, cost-cutting and macro issues, and it provided a good backdrop for the event as it helped the attendees understand they are not alone in their struggles.

Four structural trends that are changing the industry

Eswaran then moved into his presentation, starting with some trends he’s seeing. “There are four structural trends that are rapidly changing our industry and making all your jobs hard,” he said. “The first is the explosion of data in this digital age. Every company is now a software business. It’s creating massive amounts of data, and it’s exploding that every single year.”

Eswaran said that the second trend is the complexity of infrastructure. “With multiple clouds, multiple endpoints, multiple geographic locations, managing and protecting this data is extremely complex,” he said. “If your infrastructure goes down, so does your data. And if your data goes down, so does your business.”

The third trend is vendor lock-in. “Vendor lock-in into one platform or technology is an increasing problem,” he said. “If you change any part of your tech stack — whether it’s driven by a common refresh or it’s driven by aggressive price increases — you need the ability to move your data easily to the new application.”

The fourth trend, ransomware’s increasing volume and sophistication, is troubling. “According to our internal report, Ransomware Trends Report, 75 percent of companies experienced at least one ransomware attack in the last 12 months,” he said. “And a quarter of them experienced four or more.” Paying the ransom gets you very little — and you can even lose your data after paying.

Passing Dell

Eswaran trumpeted the company’s recent performance, surpassing Dell Technologies Inc. to become No. 1 in data resilience, with over $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue as of March.

He discussed the large partner ecosystem that Veeam has built, with a slide that showed that the company has value-added resellers, 12,000 Veeam cloud service provider partners and 200 distributors.

He also discussed data resilience across the company’s five pillars:

• Data backup, including the company’s four-in-one capabilities, SureBackup, performance optimizations and immutability everywhere
• Data security, including multiple approaches to malware detection in backups, advanced anomaly detection and Veeam’s Incident application programming interface
• Data recovery, including instant recovery, two-click cloud recovery, recovery to and from anywhere, automated recovery orchestration, secure restore and comprehensive recovery options
• Data freedom, including secure data mobility, instant recover and recover anywhere
• Data intelligence, including AI-powered detection, the AI digital assistant, intelligent diagnostics and AI copilot

He added that the future roadmap includes increased AI-powered protection and recovery, data protection of AI model workloads, and enabling customers to unlock insights with AI from their immutable backup data. AI is data-hungry, so I know companies will welcome that.

Working closely with Microsoft

Anton Gostev, Veeam’s chief product officer, then took the stage with Rick Vanover, the company’s vice president of product strategy for demos. Then he welcomed Microsoft Corp. corporate vice president Sue Page and Veeam Chief Operating Officer Matthew Bishop, who discussed the two firms’ partnership.

Bishop shared the focus of the partnership. “The partnership is about innovating on VDC,” he said. “And we already protect 20 million seats of Microsoft 365 in the cloud. But VDC is accelerating that more. I looked this morning, and so far, this quarter, we’re growing VDC 450% quarter on quarter.”

The two discussed the growth, and then Page mentioned Azure as an area of innovation. “In terms of Veeam Data Cloud, we believe Azure is the best thing for you guys: 60 availability zones, superior security, superior scalability,” she said. “So that’s one thing. Azure is a fantastic partner for you and Veeam Data Services.”

She added another thing: the significant investments Microsoft is making in AI: “I’m sure most of the folk in the room have heard of something called Copilot, which has been an enormous wave of investment and innovation for the company and something we believe is going to transform productivity as we all know it both individually and collectively.”

She said that partners are working in the AI space and opening up opportunities.

“Veeam is a super, super early partner developing this AI technology,” she said. “And it’s already being proven to be very exciting for customers.”

Stepping up the game with Veeam

Transitioning from Bishop and Page, Veeam played a customer story from Rabobank storage solutions manager Collin Chautelier, who said the bank chose Veeam in its move to the cloud because of its uncompromised solution.

“We had to step up our game,” he said in the video. “So we need to be able to recover our data, but also protect our data. We implemented the encryption that Veeam gives us so that all that data gathered in a nice bundle for someone to steal is useless to them. It’s encrypted. My favorite thing about Veeam: it’s not a vendor. It’s a partner.”

More demos and tech talk followed, and then the focus shifted to discussing the launch of an AI Copilot for Microsoft 365, built in partnership with Microsoft. Brandt Urban showed a demo alongside Rick Vanover. The demo showed Veeam’s efforts to use Copilot to provide insights. “We’re trying to make your jobs easier, and we’re trying to get to action,” Urban said. “In this space, it’s very important to be able to get as fast to action as you can.”

The world runs on data

As the session closed, Eswaran said he wanted to return to where VeeamOn 24 started. “The world runs on data,” he said. “And that data is growing in incredible value, and it is growing in complexity, and it is coming under increasing threat by these sophisticated ransomware attackers. Keeping that data secure, protected, and always available is the need of the day.”

He added that it requires data resilience — something Veeam’s platform was purpose-built for.

Some final thoughts

The involvement of people beyond the CEO in this keynote was an interesting view into how Veeam runs. It values its employees. It enlists and trusts partners. It listens to its customers. And it tries to innovate in partnership with all of those constituencies.

The AI revolution ignited the data resilience era. Every IT and business executive I have talked to since the ChatGPT moment has told me there is now an intense focus on all aspects of data. This puts Veeam, now the market leader in data resilience, in a great position to ride the AI wave. It’ll be interesting to see where we are in a year’s time when VeeamON 25 happens.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Veeam