If you aren’t in Miami this week, you are missing a lot of fun — and that doesn’t include the famous Veeam Party planned for this evening. Building on what happened yesterday:
Veeam announced the general availability of Veeam Availability Orchestrator version 2. I’ve preached for quite a while that there are two distinct differences between backup and DR. The technical difference is “the process,” meaning not just rapid recovery, but orchestrated workflow and testing and documentation/reporting. In addition, DR usually requires replication, but the innovative folks working on Veeam Availability Orchestrator gave us the best of both worlds with the ability to do DR from replicas or backups…with the orchestration, testing and documentation that “real DR” requires.
Veeam also celebrated more innovation around Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 version 3. SaaS backup in general, and Office 365 in particular, has been amazing to watch over the past few years, including as an analyst before joining Veeam. Just like virtualization a decade ago, new production platforms rarely have all of the plumbing in place in v1, so early Office 365 didn’t have backup mechanisms, just like VMware didn’t 13 years ago. Instead, it was up to disruptive and innovative vendors (like Veeam) to figure it out. Eventually, as all platforms do, foundational plumbing is added. At this point, there begins a race between the legacies to catch up and the early innovators to stay disruptively relevant by continuing to evolve ahead of the curve — or fade into obscurity (or be sold for the IP). Veeam already moved past “just” mailbox backups to include SharePoint and OneDrive for a more complete solution — and the innovation keeps happening with v3.
Veeam wasn’t the only one making announcements that will change the innovative delivery power within the Veeam ecosystem. Among them, IBM made a Statement of Direction around anticipated offerings that combine IBM Global Services (and Resiliency Services in particular) with Veeam’s backup and DR capabilities. IBM already has an IBM BaaS offering that is powered by Veeam, so it is very exciting to see what will come next. As mentioned earlier, there are two distinct differences between backup and DR. One is orchestration/testing/reporting (see Veeam Availability Orchestrator above) and the other is expertise; expertise that knows that real BC/DR actually has much more to do with business process than it does technical recoverability. To be clear, without your data, most of the business recoveries all fail — but just know that real DR relies on orchestrated recoverability so that the users and the business can resume. That is a very different mindset, which nobody knows better than IBM RS.
To start day two of VeeamON 2019, we are also celebrating customers who have been innovating with the continuation of Veeam Innovation Awards (VIAs). At our last two events, we honored Veeam partners who have been developing innovative solutions to bring to their customers (check out the VeeamON 2018 and Velocity 2019 award recipients). In the spirit of innovation, we changed it up a bit this year to celebrate customers that are using Veeam technologies in innovative and disruptive ways.
Today, we awarded ABM Industries with a VIA at VeeamON 2019. As they put it, ABM is “one of the largest and oldest companies that you’ve probably never heard of.” Check out their video to learn more about who ABM is and how they are using Veeam to innovate and transform how they protect and utilize their data.
Congratulations to ABM and a heartfelt Thank You to all of the Veeam customers and partners that are joining us in Miami or are using our technologies to achieve better backups, reliable recoveries, assured Availability and, ultimately, Cloud Data Management.
If you’re in Miami, we’ll see you at the party tonight.
If you aren’t in Miami, be on the lookout for a VeeamON Tour or VeeamON Forum coming soon to a regional location near you.
Either way, save the date for the next VeeamON in Las Vegas: May 4-6, 2020!
