VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas was again a great event for the Veeam Teeam! If you were there, hopefully you stopped by the Veeam booth and got a sneak peak of Veeam Backup & Replication version 6. We previewed a number of the new capabilities of our flagship product, including the expanded replication capabilities, the scale-out architecture and the ability to easily work with a number of backup targets in a storage-agnostic manner.

We are also proud to announce that Veeam once again won the Gold Award for Best New Technology with Veeam Backup & Replication version 6! The Best of VMworld awards are administered by TechTarget, a panel of judges, and the editorial staff of the various TechTarget websites.

The key take away from the Best of VMworld awards is that the companies that make up the Solutions Exchange are a vital part of the VMware and great virtualization ecosystems. Veeam is happy to once again receive a Best of VMworld award!

See also: Best of VMworld 2011 Award Official Veeam press release.

SureBackup and vPower

We started off the Spring of 2010 with our big announcement regarding SureBackup. This announcement was important for us because we knew that it was going to take some time to understand just what Recovery Verification was all about.

When you introduce something new to the market, you need to give enough time for it to soak in. When the summer came around, we started talking about vPower or Virtualization Powered-Data Protection. I gave the first live demo of SureBackup Recovery Verification, Instant VM Recovery and Universal Application Item Recovery (U-AIR) at TechFieldDay 3 in Seattle and it was very well received. So well received in fact that one of our competitors announced something very similar to our patent-pending Instant VM Recovery a few weeks later that to this day still has not been released.

Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference held in June, Veeam was recognized as a finalist for Partner of the Year in the Core Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management category. This was great recognition for Veeam, specifically around our Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware.

Launch of Veeam ONE

Veeam is more than Backup & Replication, we also have a major focus on VMware infrastructure management. Veeam ONE was launched to create a single solution that customers could look to for monitoring, capacity planning, change management, reporting and chargeback. Also, since different customers need different monitoring solutions depending on their environment, Veeam ONE comes in 3 different flavors, including flavors for Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.

Best of VMworld

For me the best part of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was winning 4 “Best of VMworld” awards. Not only did the then current version of Veeam Backup & Replication (v4) get a finalist award in its category for the 2nd year in a row, Veeam ONE also was chosen as a finalist in its category. Of course when it comes to new technology, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was the big winner with the Gold award and the top prize, Best of Show. This was the first time in the history of the awards that one vendor received 4 awards.

v5 Launch

With all of the excitement and buzz we created around SureBackup and vPower, it was great to finally release v5 to the market and watch it take off. For the launch “event,” we had more than a thousand people on a live webcast and on that day we hit an all time record for web traffic to veeam.com. So far we’ve had over 60,000 downloads and so many positive comments regarding the revolutionary functionality.

Informal poll at Gartner Data Center Conference

While not an official Gartner survey, this quick poll of 178 attendees at the 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference shows that Veeam Backup & Replication is used by the same percentage as backup solutions from the “bigger” vendors. Here’s a graphic showing the results:

The Awards!

There has been no shortage of awards for Veeam in 2010 and they seem to keep rolling in. The following were all in addition to the VMworld awards mentioned above.

• Best Free vSphere Tools – As I previously blogged about, Veeam took the top 3 spots in the VMwarevideos.com and vChat Best Free vSphere Tools survey.
  
• Virtualization Review – Veeam was also awarded 2 Reader’s Choice Awards from Virtualization Review in their 2011 Virtualization Buyer’s Guide. Veeam ONE took a merit award and Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was named a winner. These awards are based on reader input so we would like to thank everyone who voted for Veeam.
  
• SearchServerVirtualization.com Products of the Year 2010 – We were very happy to have won 2 Product of the Year awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com. Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization and v4 was also the Product of the year for 2009 in the same category – that’s 2 years in a row! Also, Veeam ONE: 2010 Product of the Year in the Virtualization Management category, that marks the first time in the history of the awards that one company has taken GOLD in 2 categories in the same year.

  

• Storage Magazine | SearchStorage.com Product of the Year – Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category. When looking at who we beat out, this is a pretty significant award for us!
  

The Results!

155%

Of course all the awards don’t really mean much without good financials to back them up. As our press release announced, Veeam had a very, very good year financially with 155% growth over last year. Being a private company we don’t detail the exact revenue, but when you consider we’ve grown over 100% each of the past 4 years it’s not difficult to figure out. So when you consider Veeam as a company to do business with, understand that we’re still growing, we’re still 100% self-funded and we’re profitable!

What has also been great is that the virtualization community has recognized us with 8 Top Virtualization Industry Awards in just 5 months since VMworld 2010 in September!!! I remember how we simply could not believe it when we learned at VMworld 2010 that we were the first company ever to win 4 “Best of VMworld” awards at a single VMworld event—including “Best of Show” for Veeam Backup & Replication v5. Then Backup & Replication v5 won a “Reader’s Choice Award” while Veeam ONE won a “Merit Award” from Virtualization Review magazine. And right after that, we received two “Product of the Year 2010” awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com (Veeam Backup & Replication won the Gold award in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization category and Veeam ONE won Gold in the Virtualization Management category).

Thank you all again for such a wonderful year! I look forward to spending an even more exciting year with you in 2011!

In the Reader’s Choice Awards, Veeam Backup and Replication v5 was selected as the winner of the Virtual Business Continuity category and the Veeam ONE Solution for VMware received the Merit Award in the Virtual Management & Optimization category.

This week, the Americas Veeam team is gathered in Atlanta for the annual kickoff for 2011; and this is great news for us to celebrate together. While we are logistically hampered by strong winter weather in the Southeast, this is a bright spot and a big deal for the Veeam team.

The Reader’s Choice Awards are available online at Virtualization Review (registration required) and are also figured in this month’s print issue of Virtualization Review magazine. Be sure to check out Veeam in the Reader's Choice Awards. Thank you virtualization community!

Below I have posted the graph showing the top 10 but notice that Veeam took the top 3 spots. Also, Veeam was the only vendor to score over 8, pretty impressive! Veeam FastSCP continues to be the most popular free vSphere tool as chosen by the community. Of course Veeam Monitor Free Edition and Veeam Reporter Free Edition also did extremely well. Thanks to everyone who voted!

Four Awards at VMworld 2010 That We Won in Q3

In Q3 we were fortunate to win “Best of Show 2010” award at the VMworld conference in San Francisco and we were the 1^st company in history to win 4 “Best of VMworld” awards. We received the Best of Show for Veeam Backup & Replication™ v5 (what we call "v5") which judges called a “cut-and-dried winner.” We also won Gold for New Technology with vPower, the breakthrough technology behind v5. For the 2^nd consecutive year, Veeam was a finalist in the Virtualization Management category with Veeam ONE and a finalist in the Business Continuity and Data Protection category with Veeam Backup & Replication.

NEW Products in Q3

Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with vPower - at the end of August we demonstrated our new "v5" and vPower technology at VMworld San Francisco. This technology powers Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 and overcomes the limitations of traditional data protection and disaster recovery software by running a VM directly from a backup file. vPower also enables these features that are innovative in the industry and which no other companies have in their products:

• Instant VM Recovery: restores an entire virtual machine from a backup file in minutes and users remain productive while IT troubleshoots the issue.
• U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery): recovers individual items from any virtualized application, on any OS, without additional backups, agents or software tools. It eliminates the need for expensive special-purpose tools and extends granular recovery to all applications and users.
• SureBackup Recovery Verification: Automatically verifies the recoverability of every backup and of every virtual machine. This features eliminates uncertainty and sets a new standard in data protection.
• On-Demand Sandbox: Create test VMs from any point in time to troubleshoot problems or test workarounds, software patches or new application code. Eliminates the need for dedicated test labs and the overhead that extra VMware snapshots place on VMs.
• Instant File-Level Recovery for any OS or file system: Recover an entire VM or an individual file from the same image-level backup. Extends instant file-level recovery to all VMs.

Our CEO, Ratmir Timashev, was quoted saying that v5 with vPower has taken VMware backup to a new level and it not only provides much better service at a much lower cost, it also offers compelling reasons to virtualize critical enterprise applications, including CRM, ERP and email systems which includes databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server and email systems such as Microsoft Exchange.

Free Edition of the Veeam Reporter - at the time of our highly anticipated "v5" release, Veeam also announced in August our new free version of the popular Veeam Reporter for VMware. Veeam Reporter allows VMware administrators to perform capacity planning, change management, and enterprise reporting and chargeback.

Veeam ONE - finally, in Q3, the company introduced Veeam ONE which is a comprehensive solution for managing the performance, configuration and utilization of VMware environments. It includes Monitoring, Capacity Planning, Change Management as well as Reporting and Chargeback. It is the only single solution that takes into account varying customer requirements and scenarios. The Veeam nworks Management Pack Plus and the Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in Plus are for companies using Microsoft System Center or the HP Operations Manager, respectively. These Veeam ONE offerings leverage and extend the management frameworks in which customers have already invested. Veeam Monitor Plus is used in other monitoring environments.

For all these achievements and successes in Q3, we are sincerely grateful to our customers, partners and the VMware community!

Be sure to check our FaceBook page for a complete collection of pictures from the show floor as well as the Veeam party.

Our CEO, Ratmir Timashev, with our Best of Show award
Read more>>

While we received over 20 registrations for the contest, we ended up with 12 winners of the $25 charity gift card. Of those 12 winners, we had 9 blog posts directing people to download Veeam Reporter Free Edition, the other 3 used twitter and other means to generate interest and drive downloads.

The recipients of the $25 charity gift cards are listed below, along with their blogs and their entries, this list is sorted alphabetically by last name:

And the winner is…

Rick Vanover! Rick is the grand prize winner and recipient of the $1,000 charity gift card. Congratulations Rick on driving the most downloads of Veeam Reporter Free Edition!

Honorable mention and $250 charity gift card goes to Jason Boche. It was a close race between Jason and Rick for the winner, less than 10 downloads separated them.

Thanks to everyone for your assistance in helping us get the word out!

The move was necessary for several reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that Veeam recognizes the value of blogging and rather than starting from scratch we decided to move VeeamMeUp. We’ve imported all of the content over and have redirected the traffic from VeeamMeUp to this new address so (hopefully) any incoming links will be preserved as well as any internal links. Of course with any migration there’s always the chance for an issue so if you notice something, please comment or let me know at VMDoug at Veeam dot com.

I will still be providing much of the content as VMDoug but you’ll also see some other contributors here as well. Our goal is to open up the blog to the smart people we have here at Veeam so that they can contribute as well. Who knows, we might even see a post or two from Ratmir.

For now, here’s a quick list of what’s been going on the past month…

• Veeam announced as Finalist for Microsoft Partner of the Year
• Veeam announces support for vSphere 4.1 and Monitor 5.0 Beta
• Veeam participates in Tech Field Day 3 in Seattle
• Veeam announces “Christmas in August” and Free Reporter
• Veeam announces record second quarter results for 2010

-doug

Recently you may have seen a blog post created by Kelly Polanski, from Wave Break, and Jason Mattox from Vizioncore. In this blog post they say a number of things about Veeam as a company as well as about our Veeam Backup & Replication product. With the Vizioncore brand going away soon, we can only guess that this is a last ditch effort by Vizioncore marketing to try and convince customers to choose Vizioncore over Veeam. While we’re not going to address every point in the blog post, we do want to make sure our customers and ProPartners can feel confident with their chosen solution of Veeam Backup & Replication.

The intro is provided by Kelly Polanski who works for Wavelength, a marketing agency that Vizioncore has hired to help them with their social media. Wavelength is also affiliated with DCIG, a company that is known to be a “pay for play” blogger service and we assume the only place Vizioncore could turn to for something positive about their product . We’re also aware that Vizioncore is using this paid analyst briefing in their training to partners.

If you have followed Veeam’s announcements over the past several quarters then you know that Veeam is a financially strong and growing company. Our results from the first quarter of 2010 were announced several weeks ago and point to our continued success. Veeam is also an international company with offices across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific and 24x7 support worldwide. It is through our strong ProPartners that Veeam has been able to see such tremendous growth, a fact pointed out by CRN in a recent article. We’ve chosen not to name names previous to this, but the fact is that many of these partners came to Veeam because of their dissatisfaction with Vizioncore.

If you have any questions regarding the technical points of Jason Mattox’s blog post, please feel free to reach out to your local Veeam Team and schedule a time to discuss your questions with them or email me VMDoug<at>Veeam<dot>com. If you know Veeam and you’ve tried Veeam Backup & Replication then we’re sure you’ll see that most of Jason’s points were simply a desperate plea to try and spread rumors and make their product look better. Don’t believe Jason or us, put Veeam Backup & Replication in the lab and decide for yourself why Veeam is the #1 solution for VMware Backup and Disaster Recovery as chosen by SearchServerVirtualization.

Interestingly, more and more customers and partners are choosing Veeam. In 2009 Veeam added over 8,000 new customers while Vizioncore added less than 4,000* - that is two times more customers choosing Veeam! In Q1 of 2010 Veeam added 1,400 new customers while Vizioncore added less than 600* – that’s more than two times more customers choosing Veeam. The graphic representation of this is below:

*These estimates are based on Vizioncore marketing materials.

But of course don’t just take our word for it; here is what our customers and partners have to say about Veeam:

• INSANE BACKUP SPEED - Customer Feedback on Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0
• Worldwide Engineering Firm Increases Backup Speed by 93 Percent and Reduces Backup Monitoring Time to Zero
• File-Level Recovery Speed Improves Dramatically for School District
• HAMA, Specialist of Multimedia Accessories, Relies on Veeam Backup & Replication for Ongoing Virtualization Plans
• Veeam Backup & Replication™ to Become Tyco Electronics’ EMEA Standard
• More case studies

Another interesting trend is what Google shows in the terms of interest in our brand. As you can see, Veeam continues to rise while Vizioncore continues to fall. Desperate? Maybe...

How Veeam is trending