Interview. Object First, the Veeam-only backup target hardware supplier, is in a highly penetratable growth market because it prioritizes security over low cost/TB and can easily be sold by Veeam’s channel and bought by Veeam’s customers.
The startup was announced by Veeam co-founders Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov in 2022. It provides its Ootbi backup target appliance with disk storage front-ended by an SSD ingestion cache and object lock-style immutability. Object First recently announced encouraging growth numbers and CEO David Bennett talked about Object First’s market fit in a briefing session last week. We’ve edited the session for readability.
Blocks & Files: Talk about the founding of Object First.
David Bennett: When Ratmir and Andre sold the majority stake of Veeam back in 2019, you’d think two guys that make that kind of money would go off and sit on the beach somewhere, but not those two guys. They both said, what’s the first thing we’re gonna go and do? Why don’t we build a storage company to make Veeam a better company?
Why don’t we go and create a modern storage company that customers love, uniquely solves the security problem by not putting the burden on the user, and deals with a modern technology, which is S3, which is how the hyperscalers store data, but then bring it into a backup use case.
We launched in North America in last year and at end of last year and beginning of this year, we also extended into Europe. And Europe has been Veeam’s biggest installed base. Our big focus now is launching in Europe. And we’ve built an inside sales organization in Barcelona. We have a support organization in Poland and a development organization in Poland too.
We are recruiting like crazy. As a global company, we added 52 people already this year. We’re looking to add about another 35 people this year, and 26 of those are in Europe.
if you look at some of the results, you know we can talk about the big 700 percent plus year over year growth. Actually that’s not as important because actually this time last year, we were testing the product. So 700 percent is like, anyone could do 700 percent when you only sell one last year, and you sell seven this year.
What’s really more interesting is since Q4 last year, we’ve been able to grow north of 30 percent every single quarter. I have been really, really beyond happy in our growth. Because if you think about it: new company, new product in a space that’s dominated by legacy technology, and nobody runs out and goes and buys the latest storage product.
Blocks & Files: Are you still specifically focused on Veeam as a source for all the backup data you store? Or will you gradually open out to other backup software sources?
David Bennett: Everyone asks that question. And so my answer to that is, we are going to stay absolutely focused on Veeam for three predominant reasons. Number one, is, if you create a storage product that is designed for multiple vendors and product sets, you actually become mediocre. Because if you create a product, it’s got to work with the Commvault, Veritas, Avamar, etc. I mean, how many other backup software solutions are there?
Number two is, because of being able to try and create a product that operates across multiple vendors, there is no way you can ensure the highest level of security across every single one of those vendors.
And then, as you think about growing an organization, building a sales team, building a market and uniquely solving a problem, it’s way easier for me to say we uniquely solved the one problem that Veeam has, which is a complex storage environment that is insecure. And so from a kernel market perspective, I’m just absolutely focused on uniquely solving that that Veeam problem. And Veeam has 550,000 customers globally.
Blocks & Files: You’re not target-restricted.
David Bennett: We’re not target-restricted at all. If we penetrated that customer base 20 percent, we’d be a billion dollar storage company. That would put us in the number two position behind Dell if we did nothing else.
Blocks & Files: Will you add deduplication capabilities to the product?
David Bennett: Great question. Simple answer is, is no, we will not. And here’s the reason why: Every other product and storage vendor has tried to create their own tech stack and say we do all these cool things. What we’ve said is, why don’t you use the power of Veeam as that already has dedupe, and manage it and use the the power of Veeam? We leverage that on our box and our software stack, rather than saying we need to go and create this feature or functionality of dedupe, or encryption and things like that. That makes zero sense.
Blocks & Files: You could add hardware compression?
David Bennett: We could add hardware compression. Again, the way I think about it is, let’s tie our product to how Veeam should be working to get the power of Veeam, and then you’re going to get the outcome you would have had.
Blocks & Files: Okay, I’m a Quantum DXi channel salesperson. I’ve listened to what you’ve said, and I’m really, really happy. Because my cost per terabyte of backup effective backup data storage is way way lower than yours is going to be. Because I dedupe and compress and you don’t.
David Bennett: My answer to that is, what’s the point of deduping and compression if someone gets into your Quantum backup repository and deletes the data? Absolutely zero. And the big difference between us and all these other guys is, is two things.
I’m more paranoid than anyone about everything, and don’t trust any anything. And we built our product from the ground up and designed it with a zero trust architecture from day one.
If you think about everyone else, all of these legacy companies, they’re good products. But they were designed for a world that existed five or six years ago. So by designing a product with zero trust by design, we took the view that we’re going to assume the bad guys have got access to your VM credentials. We’re going to assume the bad guys get the admin credentials into our infrastructure. And, by the way, we’re also going to assume the bad guys have been sniffing around your business and everything anyhow. And so even if somebody has access to the VM server, has access to our UI, they cannot go and delete information on the device. So sorry, we’re very different from everyone else.
Some vendors say they are immutable – until you have to get root access to go and change something. But as soon as you give someone root access, you might as well just give them the keys to your kingdom, because you’ve given them literally the ability to go and delete something.
Blocks & Files: So from your point of view, you’re talking to customers who are sensitized to malware and ransomware. And whose priority is ensuring they’ve got clean backups from which they can recover. They are going to get hit by ransomware. They need clean backups to recover from and this is far, far more important than a lower dollars per terabyte of backup capacity.
David Bennett: Absolutely. And we will always say to people you have to modernize your backup tech stack. Everybody rushes out to go and buy the latest security product. Maybe don’t try CrowdStrike after this latest problem! Everyone says I get about security and adds a new security layer. People aren’t yet thinking about that in the backup world, because the backup side has always been like this ugly stepchild. But what we’re saying to people is, it needs to be elevated to a first class citizen. Because if you have no data in a business, you have no business.
And what you need to do is, you need to have a fully, truly immutable storage solution that operates on a zero trust framework.
Blocks & Files: Does the public cloud have a role?
David Bennett: You should absolutely also include the cloud. For archiving and things like that, the cloud is awesome. You should absolutely use the cloud. You should archive your backups after seven days, 14 days to the cloud.
The problem is, is if you want to recover 30, 40, 50, 100 terabytes from the cloud, two things are going to happen. One, they’re going to charge you. So not only have you been kicked in the shins, by being hacked, you’ve been kicked in the shins because you have to pay to get your information back.
And then it’s going to take you four to six weeks to get that information back because they’re going to throttle it. That’s a bad scenario. And so what we’re saying to people is, you need to modernize your security tech stack. You need to solve the number one problem, which is: you don’t have any data, you have no company.
Blocks & Files: Are you going to scale out your clusters to more than four nodes?
David Bennett: That’s a marketing limit, because I don’t want sales reps going and chasing Fortune 500 companies for instance. The simple answer is, there is no technical restriction on the scale over four. With Veeam’s latest update they allow something called multiple scale-out backup repositories.
There’s actually a benefit as, instead of saying, let’s create one large, monolithic cluster of let’s say, 12 boxes, if you wish create three different sets of four clusters. That’s an order of magnitude, even higher security level from a customer perspective.
In Veeam’s 12.1, you can have these multiple backup scattered repositories all look like one. And the data is segmented between them. Another benefit is it’s all managed in Veeam. It all looks very simple to manage.
Blocks & Files: Will you think about adding all-flash systems, or are you content with a flash landing zone and then just letting Western Digital and Seagate bring you bigger and bigger discs?
David Bennett: The simple answer is, I could see potentially in the future – and this is like a year for us – then maybe there’s a benefit with an all-flash capability.
I think the question is, what are we trying to solve for? Today, with flash ingestion to hard drive, we’ve seen zero bottleneck – even with companies that have 100 terabytes backups and things like that. Speed is not a problem today. And normally you’re going to flash because flash gives you faster ingest and faster recovery.
Obviously, as our business grows, as we become more and more proliferated in our customer base, we may see segments of the customers that today we’re not targeting. Because ‘I don’t have a mission-critical financial system,’ or ‘I’m not a telco that for every minute, I’m down, I’m losing 10 million bucks.’
In the future, that may be a need. Today, we don’t see that need. Today, we’re more than enough covering the speed requirements of the customer base that we’re targeting.
Blocks & Files: You’re selling into accounts that, before you knock on the door, are storing backups somewhere else. I think by definition, you’re taking business from somebody else. Have you made enough sales to start getting a feel of who you’re taking share from?
David Bennett: I think there’s actually three or four answers to that.
You’re absolutely right, everybody has already got something. But we’re also a new category. We had a pretty large regional school in North America said that a school down the road got hacked. They called us on Thursday, and said, ‘I don’t have an immutable backup solution, I already have a storage infrastructure. If I don’t get something in, I am worried that literally, I’m going to be the next guy.’ And that business closed within an eight hour window.
The second piece is, as we know, the storage industry has typically historically always been on storage lifecycle refresh rates. So everyone says, ‘I’m going to refresh my storage infrastructure between the three and five year period.’ Just happens. So in that scenario, okay, yeah, we are replacing other vendors. They’re the vendors you mentioned [Dell PowerProtect, HPE StoreOnce, Quantum DXi, Veritas.] Honestly, it’s a mix across all of them.
Because now we’re now we’re able to say, here’s a modern solution, it frees you from the backup admin hell that you’ve had to actually go and do something that’s worthwhile for your organization, rather than doing maintenance.
What’s interesting here, as well, as you think about the reseller marketplace. If you’re a Quantum partner, or HPE partner and Dell partner, you’re going to say, ‘Hold on a minute. I’m already selling HPE.’ Well, they don’t do what we do. So we’ve been able to go to those partner networks and say, it’s a new category.
What’s also interesting is a lot of Veeam partners are software-centric resellers. Software-centric resellers don’t want to go anywhere near hardware and they certainly don’t want to go anywhere near storage infrastructure, because it’s technically challenging to sell. Well, now they’ve got a product they could sell into a customer base and know intrinsically. I mean, the product’s so easy to set up, even I can do it.
And it gives them more money. And ultimately, somebody else is already selling into their customer. So they get more account control.
Blocks & Files: So Object First is Veeam first?
David Bennett: Obviously we’re two separate companies. We’re not affiliated with Veeam or anything like that – OK, founders aside, etc. But if you think about Veeam, it wants to make its customers happy. It’s a win win. We only win if Veeam wins. And so we’ve got one focus – which is to make the Veeam ecosphere better and more secure.
