Storage News
Veeam CTO On Why Veeam Wanted To Be Acquired And What Comes Next
Joseph F. Kovar
Veeam's next growth wave will come in the U.S. where it has a fourth-place market share, and that requires Veeam to move its operations, leadership, board of directors, and focus out of Europe and to the U.S., Danny Allan told CRN in an exclusive meeting.
Why did Veeam feel the need to be acquired at this time?
This is the next step on a very exciting journey. Over the past decade, we've achieved some massive milestones. In 2019, we passed a billion dollars in annual sales. And that was based on the growth of the modern data center. And we saw this is the right time and the right partner to prepare for the next wave. We talk about Act II a lot. Act I was very much about winning the virtualization wars and winning the modern data center wars. But now we're entering into the cloud era. We see customers now in a very big way moving to the public cloud and deploying hybrid cloud strategies. And we've been working very closely with Insight Partners since 2013. We took a large investment in early 2019. So it's the right partner for us, but also the right time, because we believe that if we can win in the data protection space for the next two years, we'll win and dominate for the next decade.
As part of this acquisition, Veeam's two co-founders, Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev, will step down from the board of directors and will no longer be part of the company. What is happening there?
At the close of the transaction--we're targeted to close at the end of Q1--they'll be stepping down from the board because we'll have 100 percent U.S. ownership and 100 percent U.S. board of directors. So they'll be stepping down from the board and won't be employed by Veeam. I expect there to be a transition period where we'll work together. It's a very strong relationship. And they will work during that transition period to ensure a seamless transition.
