Data protector Veeam has announced its 41st consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, and is edging towards $1bn annual revenues.
The company says it made its first $1m+ deal in the UK in the third 2018 quarter and gained almost 9,000 new customers in EMEA during the quarter.
Veeam provides backup to virtualized servers, and its marketing message majors on availability. The company was founded in 2006 by President Ratmir Timashev and co-CEO Andrei Baranv. Timashev previously founded Aelita Software, a systems management tool maker for Windows Server platforms that was acquired by Quest Software in 2004.
In 2013, Insight Venture Partners made an undisclosed investment in Veeam for an undisclosed, but minority, stake and a seat on the board. The privately-held company appears to be self-funding since then. It does not disclose its profits.
Focus and hunger
Veeam does not do anything fancy. But over the years it has retained its focus on providing comprehensive and easy to use virtual server backup. The company has constantly updated and extended the core product’s capabilities as virtual server use grew and grew.
Revenues started climbing significantly in 2008 and accelerated through 2009 and 2010. The chart below shows customer growth in 1,000s and revenue growth in $1,000s too.
Progress has been meteoric. For example, in March 2013 it had 64,000 customers and protected four million virtual machines. By August that year there were more than 73,000 customers. By then Veeam had a billion dollar revenue target as a goal. In April 2016 the customer count passed 193,000 and it said it hoped to achieve a billion dollar run rate in 2018.
It’s nearly there, having outgrown, as far as we know, every other backup company, from Acronis and Asigra, through Commvault, Datto, Dell EMC, Druva, HPE, IBM, to Rubrik, Veritas and numerous others.
Its global customer base has passed 320,000. It seems fairly certain Veeam will hit the billion dollar run rate sometime in early 2019, perhaps before, if it has a knock out fourth quarter.
Can anything stop the Veeamster’s progress? Will it become a $2bn run rate company? We think this is achievable. But to do this it must continue to riding the virtual server backup wave in the hybrid cloud as the servers become containerised and cloud-instantiated. Data management provides upselling possibilities.
