Veeam Gets Acquired for $5 Billion

Veeam Software this week announced it is being acquired by the investment firm Insight Partners for $5 billion as part of an effort to better position the company to take advantage of expected demand for data management and protection tools spanning multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments.

Scheduled to be closed in the first quarter of 2020, the deal will result in Veeam moving its corporate headquarters from Switzerland to the U.S. with William H. Largent being promoted to CEO while Danny Allan has been promoted to CTO. Largent was previously executive vice president (EVP) for operations at Veaam, while Allan had been serving as vice president of product strategy.

Following the close of the deal, Veeam co-founders Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev will step down from the board.

Veeam is currently generating $1 billion in annual sales from a base of more than 365,000 customers worldwide. Most of that success has been built around providing data protection for virtual machines. More recently, Veeam has extended its reach into public clouds. The next big opportunity will be delivering data management and protection capabilities across hybrid cloud computing environments made up of virtual machines, containers and serverless computing frameworks, says Allan.

The company is a position to provide that capability because it already abstracts data in a way that makes it possible to manage and protect it across multiple platforms, adds Allan.

In general, Allan notes the opportunity for Veeam and its partners now goes will beyond data protection, which is only one aspect of data management. Many customers are also using data protection tools to move data in and out of public clouds, adds Allan.

“We’re entering an era of cloud data management,” says Allan.

It may take a few years yet for the hybrid cloud computing to fully manifest itself. However, as the amount of data that needs to be managed in the cloud and on-premises continues to grow there’s no doubt customers will be looking to channel partners to help manage it all.