Data sovereignty is obviously a big one as people understand their data is critical

Anthony Spiteri leads Service Provider products and partners program at Veeam. Speaking to  Enterprise IT World, Spiteri talks about the product line up, the outlook of the company and the role Veeam has played in pushing Cloud adoption. In an interview with Enterprise IT, he speaks about a range of issues including Katan10, partner program, back up and data recovery for containers and for open-source platforms. Read on to know more the company’s initiatives…

1. Why do you think the migration from VMware to Red Hat environment taking place?

The open source and the cloud native world has made people more aware about different software available in the market and Red Hat obviously played very well in that space. They have Openshift, OpenStack and Red Hat virtualization platform. The Red Hat Virtualize is based on KVM, that’s one reason. The second is people are saying that VMware is becoming too expensive and it’s difficult to justify the cost anymore.

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We are never going to pretend to be a company that will say it can detect ransomware beforehand because that’s almost impossible.

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2. Customers and CIOs are moving back from public to private cloud owing to hypervisors and the availability of new technologies. Is Veeam marking this lc as well?

Yes, I began to see this shift five plus years ago when I worked for a service provider. The shift is more about the technology available on premises now and if you can get the same sort of experience in terms of consuming services on premises, then why go to a cloud if it costs more. The rise of infrastructure as code, API’s, automation, and software as a service has also driven a lot of people back to on premises. That’s where the multi cloud comes into play.

Data sovereignty is obviously a big one as people understand their data is critical and in certain regions regulatory or otherwise, people want to keep their data on premises. I also believe people have just gotten used to the fact that they can have the best of both worlds these days.

3. So you’re of the opinion that it will be a hybrid one?

Absolutely, hybrid multi cloud. Public cloud players pushed a lot of their marketing on moving from capex to opex but effectively today, everything is as a service—even at Veeam, we’ve moved to month by month billing for a lot of our services. So that has changed the dynamic so that argument doesn’t hold anymore.

4. While your roadmap for 2021 includes multiple products, is Veeam Availability Suite version 11a the primary focus for the brand?

Yes. That’s right. Everything kind of focuses on that. We wouldn’t be anything without the Veeam Availability Suite because that is central to everything that we do from a hypervisor perspective. But make no mistake, the backup for public cloud is equally important to us as we feel that hasn’t been tapped as yet.

5. The growth of Kubernetes container technologies is very evident. Which one is important to Veeam?

The short answer is every platform. Kasten K10 is beautiful because it installs across almost every Kubernetes platform including Red Hat Openshift, IBM Cloud and other public cloud. Kasten K10 is a Kubernetes deployment, so it deploys as an application inside Kubernetes with multiple containers and the product is  portable. In fact, we don’t worry about the platform, from a Veeam Backup and Replication point of view, because it is agnostic.

6. Here’s a question on behalf of the CIOs. When a service provider releases new update its challenging for customers to upgrade immediately. Customers complain VM is not supportive of the newer version. What are your thoughts? 

Generally, any software that upgrades pose challenges and a lot of planning goes into new updates by a company. I would never advocate people upgrading straightaway and do testing. This is also dependent on the scale and capabilities of the company. At Veeam, we have 1 million active Veeam Backup & Replication installations and we focus on reliability, hence we have a very strong QI team that ensures that most of the issues are resolved before product is passed to GA. Especially with the backup and replication, it’s an in-place upgrade, so 99 times out of 100, you will get a very smooth upgrade.

7. How do you create awareness that data backup, storage and replication is different from a security posture of a company.

We are never going to pretend to be a company that will say it can detect ransomware beforehand because that’s almost impossible. From a security perspective, we have been very strong on that front and it is evident from the new product features and the fact that we leverage immutability, multi factor authentication and SSO for logins. So in that sense, security is still key to what we do we because we can’t release a product that’s not secure. Security as a whole is a bigger conversation, as that includes education, good behavior, and bigger plans to recover data, processes in place for reporting.

8. What is the kind of growth you are seeing in the partner space?

There was about 20 to 25% growth year on year in our main cloud service provider number – Veeam Cloud and Service Provider (VCSP) number. We have a strong partner ecosystem and breadth of integration and our partner community marries with the VMware community. We allow our service providers to create service offerings based on our technology and building unique partnerships allow us to offer smart services that drive profitability and growth for both parties.

9. What are your views on API integration and partner opportunity?

Automation infrastructure is cloud native and the way we consume technology has fundamentally shifted over the past two to four years. Anything that you can do through code in a repeatable way. However, the ability to configure, adjust and report is equally important, which is why, Veeam has been very focused on releasing modern API’s. Releasing good API allows you to circumvent the console and customers don’t have to log into an interface to get the information and it enables to access the data a lot quicker and also allows to ingest  data into a third party tools.

10. Any forecast or growth projections you have for a particular market segment…

We are focusing on government worldwide. We are certainly looking to do more with the American government department of defense. All verticals are equal at the moment as we offer such a wide array of tools that it’s never one that’s going to dominate over the other. We rely on our partners and their interaction with their own customers. That’s what drives the vertical for us.

11. Any message that you would like to give out to the customers and CIOs?

I would recommend them to have a look at their data as a whole and understand where the workloads live. They should also understand the category of criticality  which will help them drive the backup. You can now get smart with the technologies in our platform to be able to backup and replicate and do more with the product to get better outcomes.