NAKIVO has announced v11.1 of its Backup & Replication software and so we thought it would be. a good time to take a look at the company.
It was started up in 2012 in the USA by CEO Bruce Talley and six others: VP Product Management Sergei Serdyuk, QA engineer and product manager Veniamin Simonov, VP SW Development Nail Abdalla, VP Operations Margarita Matsko, Senior SW Developer Oleksii Osypov, and VP for QA, Sergey Yazvinskiy. Simonov is now at Xopero Software in Poland. The initial intent was to provide VMware vSphere backup, like Veeam. It expanded to cover Hyper-V in 2016, added disaster recovery and business continuity in 2018, AHV support and MSP market coverage in 2019. MSPs can offer backup (BaaS), replication (RaaS) and disaster recover (DRaaS) all as a service. The SW covers AWS EC2, Oracle databases, Office 365 and more environments and there have been no external funding rounds, it growing its business from its revenues. in fact it’s been profitable from year one.
Like Acronis, Veeam and HYCU source Comtrade SW, NAKIVO has a strong eastern European background. Veeam and Acronis have grown the most but NAKIVO has grown quite impressively too.
Serdyuk told us the firm has more than 16,000 paying customers, with coverage for physical, virtual and NAS sites, and cloud/SaaS operations. It provides, it says, fast recovery with instant restore and automated failover, handled through a unified, single pane of glass management console. There are over 3,000 channel partners and, Serdyuk said: ”Roughly half of our revenue and customers are coming from EMEA, 35 percent comes from Americas and 15 percent from Asia.” Prominent customers include CocaCola, Cisco, the Detroit Police, Honda, the city of Dan Francisco, Siemens, Radisson and Verifone.
He explained that: “MSP is one of our big customer groups. We have a very good solution for them because we are cost effective. They care a lot about this because MSPs need to be competitive.”
The second quarter of this year found NAKIVO enjoying 40 percent year-on-year revenue growth in the Americas, with 22 percent revenue growth overall. Its customer count grew 9 percent Y/Y; that’s over 1,400 new customers. There was a 43 percent growth in enterprise deployments so it’s not just more small and medium businesses coming on board.
The Backup & Replication product has had additional functionality added steadily over the years and, naturally, cybersecurity is coming to the fore these days;
The company has added functionality such as MFA, RBAC, backup immutability, and encryption. V11.1 brings in a Direct Connect facility for MSPs whereby they can connect to tenant VMware, Hyper-V, and Proxmox VE virtual machines, and physical servers, without requiring open ports on the tenant side.
Serdyuk told us: “it allows our MSP customers to seamlessly connect to their clients without having to tweak networking infrastructure at the client site. So they basically download the component, install it, and it connects back securely to the MSP.”
There is multi-language support, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish and Chinese. Proxmox VE backups get the ability to have virtual machines booted from them, have replicas created, restore direct from tape, VM temp-lates to maintain configuration consistency, and automated backup integrity validation.
Serdyuk said VMware migration as a big issue for SMBs: “You probably remember this big turmoil with changes in Broadcom and ProxMox, by our data, was the number one platform that businesses of all sizes consider migrating to. Of course, the larger the business, the less likely they were going to migrate. … A good portion of our customers started using ProxMox in production and we continue to develop it.”
VMware gets real-time replication with automated failover to real-time VM replicas during outages. Serdyuk again: “Before we started, my assumption was that real time replication would only be used by enterprises. It turns out that SMBs also want to do this, but on a much smaller scale. They would just have a couple of virtual machines for which they want to have real time replication.”
On the physical server side there are more granular backups, for specific volumes and folders on Windows and Linux machines without requiring full backups.
NAKIVO is less expensive than Veeam;
We asked Serdyuk if NAKIVO will start providing AI facilities for users to query and manage their backups? He said: “That’s the future, obviously. Yes.” But: ”My thinking is that, at least at this point in time, I view AI as a really like a copilot where you can have distributed infrastructure. I will not trust AI to do a failover. I could maybe trust the script, but even then, I still want the human to look at something before they push the big red button.”
He believes that NAKIVO”s growth will accelerate: “We are making internal changes that should accelerate us. We should grow twice as faster as we are now.”
Download a NAKIVO presentation deck, with more information, including (US) pricing tables, here.
