When I first started working with Veeam Software before becoming a Veeam Vanguard and joining the Veeam Product Strategy Team, one of the things that was so appealing is that it's so easy to get started with and use.

Before I knew it, I was backing up and restoring virtual machines with ease. Now, I want to take a closer look at what makes Veeam products so approachable.

Get ready for May — VeeamON is coming to Miami! Back for a fifth installment, the premier conference for Intelligent Data Management will bring together IT professionals from all around the globe to discover the latest news in Availability through inspiring breakout sessions, presentations and networking.

As 2018 comes to a close, we are proud to have completed the fourth year of the Veeam Vanguard Program. The Veeam Vanguard Program is Veeam’s global, top-level influencer program. Each Vanguard is nominated (either by themselves or others) and selected by the Veeam Product Strategy team. There are Vanguards of all types and all backgrounds — what will the 2019 program have in store?

Small businesses are the heart of economic activity in any country. Despite the large enterprises getting all the headlines, small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) provide critical services and jobs in their community and globally, and often come up with incredible innovations. However, to be able to compete with large enterprises in this age of data hyper-growth and customers demanding instant gratification, SMBs require some backup (pun intended). They need to avoid interruptions to their business while being as efficient as possible. Ensuring data protection for the SMB is key.

One of the interesting things I’ve seen over the years is people switching backup products. Additionally, it is reasonable to say that the average organization has more than one backup product. At Veeam, we’ve seen this over time as organizations started with our solutions. This was especially the case before Veeam had any solutions for the non-virtualized (physical server and workstation device) space. Especially in the early days of Veeam, effectively 100% of business was displacing other products — or sitting next to them for workloads where Veeam would suit the client’s needs better.

As the new world debate of containers vs virtual machines continues, there is also a debate raging about stateful vs stateless containers. Is this really a thing? Is this really happening in a production environment? Do we really need to backup containers, or can we just backup the data sets they access? Containers are not meant to be stateful are they? This debate rages daily on Twitter, reddit and pretty much in every conversation I have with customers.

At VeeamON 2018, the batch of Veeam Innovation Awards went out to the top innovations and we already covered, Probax and Iland, who did amazing things with Office 365 and some great implementations built on top of Veeam Cloud Connect, respectively. Looking back at last year’s solutions, two other awardees leveraged the breadth of Veeam’s technologies within their offerings: SIS and Merrimac.

The nomination window for the 2019 Veeam Innovation Awards for Partners is closing in a few days, so we’re taking a minute to highlight some of the VIA 2018 winners announced earlier this year with a few VCSPs.

When we released Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 in July, we saw a huge adoption rate and a large inquiry on running the solution within Azure. It is with great pleasure, we can announce that Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is now available in the Azure Marketplace!

Four years ago, Veeam delivered to the market ground-breaking native snapshot integration into NetApp’s flagship ONTAP storage operating system. In addition to operational simplicity, improved efficiencies, reduced risk and increased ROI, the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform and ONTAP continues to help customers of all sizes accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives and compete more effectively in the digital economy.