Veeam – A $1 Billion Revenue Company in the Making

According to Gartner and Forester, the Enterprise Backup and Recovery market is estimated to be worth $5 billion and growing at 10% annually. The researchers estimate that the bigger space of Data Management, which includes activities like data analysis, archival, de-duplication, and reduction to be worth $15 billion annually. BAAR, Switzerland-based Veeam is making big strides within this market segment.

Veeam’s Offerings
Veeam was founded in 2006 by Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov. The two founders had scouted the market to identify a suitable market opportunity. They narrowed in on creating tools needed by VM administrators to simplify their daily jobs involving monitoring, administration management, and backup. It was a good market to enter considering that within the US alone, 69% companies were implementing virtualization technologies even back in 2006.

Soon, Veeam launched their first product in the form of Veeam Monitor, an application that allowed monitoring and resource management for VMware Virtual Machines. But the company hit it big in 2008 when they released their first Backup and Replication offering. Today the Veeam Backup & Replication suite remains geared toward helping organizations get the full benefits of a virtualized environment by providing them with a solution that is fast, flexible, and reliable. It features an agentless backup and recovery, extended support for VMware and Hyper-V, and Virtualization-powered data protection. Organizations are able to deploy the application to ensure that they have reliable capabilities to create backups and replicas from storage snapshots and recover objects from any virtualized application onto any OS.

They have done away with most of their initial products and now rely extensively on the Backup and Replication offering, which accounts for nearly 95% of their revenues.

Veeam’s products have helped them acquire several accolades and numerous customers. They have received awards such as VMworld’s Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation, Best of Show, and Best Virtualization for Disaster Recovery. At the end of 2013, Veeam had more than 91,500 total customers with Backup and Replication accounting for over 73,000 customers worldwide. More recently, Veeam announced their customer base to have grown to 111,500 worldwide.

Veeam’s Financials
Veeam has also reported strong financial growth. They earn revenues through their licenses and service contracts. Last year, they had clocked $220 million in revenues. They estimate that they hold nearly 20% of the overall VMWare backup market. Veeam claims that they are trending towards $500 million in revenues this year. They have been profitable since 2009. Their next goal is to become a $1 billion company by 2018.

They plan to achieve that by increasing focus on the mid-market segment, increasing market share within the cloud backup capabilities for moving data offsite and by creating similar capability products for Microsoft’s Hyper V users.

Unlike other companies, Veeam has not relied on venture funding. The founders invested $5 million of their own money to start the company. Though last August, Insight Venture Partners became a minority partner with them, Veeam maintains that the investment was not driven by cash needs, but was rather driven by the need for strategic guidance from Insight Venture Partners.