Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2016
At the recent VeeamON Tour, in Fourways, Johannesburg, ITWeb chatted to Doug Hazelman, VP of Product Strategy at Veeam Software, about where the company is taking its technology.
Keynote speaker and futurist Dion Chang spoke a lot about companies needing to pivot to accommodate the new business paradigm of 'disrupt or be disrupted'. But how is Veeam itself pivoting?
Hazelman says: "If you look at our history as a company, we pivot every 18 months to two years. We have had a number of different pivots, of which availability is our latest. We're also focusing a lot more on enterprise, to help disrupt in that area. Our next major pivot will probably come in the next 12 months."
VeeamON Tour is known as a way for Veeam to communicate with its channel partners and its customers on new product developments and changes. Hazelman himself was the key speaker on Veeam v9.5. Asked what bigger trends were behind the launch of v9.5, he characteristically brings it back to customers: "Any release is based on customer feedback - that's always one of the things we want to deliver on. The biggest focus on our next release is enterprise and scalability, as we attract larger and larger customers with larger and larger infrastructures," he says.
"We're going from supporting hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) to tens of thousands of VMs. We have over 200 000 customers, most of which have tens or hundreds of VMs. It's the order of magnitude that is different in v9.5," he says.
Hazelman is well aware of the budgetary constraints companies suffer currently, and says CIOs can fairly easily justify spending money on products that boost the availability of data. "Business today is really simply about availability - what is the cost of downtime and are you willing to take that cost on if something happens? Irrespective of which business you're in, finding ways to explain to the CFO what the actual cost of downtime is to the business will assist the CIO in getting the money needed, securing the necessary budget to ensure availability. It doesn't help your bottom-line if you offer your customers a lot of features and functions, but your data isn't available and you can't deliver on the services you offer," Hazelman concludes.
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