Let’s set the stage for this article, shall we?
At VMworld 2017 this year I had the chance to attend Veeams’ Press Breakfast. Now, I’ve been to press events before and very seldom have I ever wrote an article about them – I mean, they aren’t a technical deep dive into any technology – sometimes there is embargo pre-release information given out, but really the goal is to lay out your companies broader vision and scope for the press and analysts in attendance.
So why an article this time?
It’s not because the eggs were delicious or the coffee was strong – also, it’s not due to any peeks into the future or pre-release information as there was none handed out. Honestly – the very first slide of co-CEO Peter McKay’s presentation is what stood out for me. That slide contained the exact same image as shown below.
The gist – it’s not the strongest that survives, nor the smartest – but the one that can best adapt to change around them. This got the wheels in my head turning a bit – how could this quote, a quote written by a man over 200 years ago – how could this possibly apply to a tech company in today’s world? Which kind of led to me to a final thought…
How has Veeam changed over the years?
I don’t recall the exact day I started using Veeam Backup & Replication. It was sometime around the v3 days – but what I can remember is some of their messaging over the years – and how that has changed…
#1 for VMware
This one phrase resonated with me – at the time anyway! Most organizations in the 2008-2010 era were heavily focused on deploying VMware environments and virtualizing their workloads. We quickly realized that we needed some way to protect these VMs – something that was different from our traditional backup methods – which brings us to the next era of Veeam messaging
Purpose Built for Virtualization
We saw an influx of Hyper-V environments being built as the industry was finally getting to a point where Hyper-V was “good enough”. Therefore, we saw Veeam add support for the new Hypervisor and change their messaging to Purpose Built! We needed something different from our legacy backup software to work within our virtualization environments – and Veeam was delivering on this with software designed around virtualization.
Availability for the Modern Datacenter
With the influx of cloud services occurring over the next little while we once again saw Veeam adapt – adding the ability to offload backup copies to the cloud as well as their own service providers via Cloud Connect. We see the “purpose-built for virtualization” messaging dwindling away as Veeam began to release products which handled physical endpoint backups for both Windows and Linux. Veeam was turning more and more into an availability company – moving away from the data protection business.
Availability for the Always-On Enterprise
And here we are today – Veeam has changed in a lot of ways and added a slew of new products and functionality to adapt to the way data centers are operated. Today Veeam is aiming to provide availability to our data no matter where it lives – in a hypervisor, in the cloud, via SaaS applications – Veeam is trying to be the end all be all when it comes to providing availability of the data!
So yeah, we have definitely seen growth within Veeam as a company over the last decade! Everyone notices that – but hopefully this helps shed some light on how the organization itself has had to adapt to change! In technology, nothing is static – we are always seeing new bright and shiny things – and as Charles said 200 years ago, those who can adapt to change, or in today’s terms, respond to how the market is fluctuating in front of them will be the ones who survive! Call it agility, responsiveness, innovation, whatever – in the end it all comes down to how a company responds – and this is exactly what companies like Veeam need to do to not just stay ahead in today’s world – but stay afloat!
So yeah, a post about a press breakfast! Thanks for reading!
