Veeam pokes channel stick at Commvault at VMworld

Veeam Software has announced a big annual rise in enterprise business and says it is set to beat the current annual sales of rival Commvault.

The data availability and backup firm is now looking to recruit an extra 400 staff globally to help address growing cloud business and keep the product enhancements coming.

Peter McKay, president and COO at Veeam, told ChannelBiz at this week’s VMworld conference in Barcelona: “We are now projecting our annual revenues for this year [calendar end 2016] will reach $610 million [which is a big jump on last year’s $500 million-plus]. This will take us above Commvault’s current $600 million.”

McKay, who joined channel-only Veeam earlier this year from VMware, said Veeam had increased its headcount from 1,900 to 2,500 in the past year, and now had around 400 vacancies in areas including cloud, sales, marketing, development, support and engineering.

He also stressed that all Veeam’s revenue was from licenses, and that the channel had an open season on the services revenue that can be generated from its products – unlike Commvault, he claimed.

McKay said: “Commvault’s revenue is split around 50:50 in licensing and services, so they are leaving less for their partners.”

Commvault publicly does not see Veeam as a major rival as it claims its feature set is wider and can address the needs of the biggest organisations. While Veeam started out mainly targeting the SMB market, it has widened its feature set and can now point to many more enterprise backup and data management clients.

Veeam has just announced a 31 percent year-over-year (YoY) jump in total bookings revenue for Q3 2016, and along with that a 49 percent YoY increase in new license bookings from “large enterprise deals” – “solidifying the increasing demand for 24.7.365 availability as enterprises embrace digital transformation”, Veeam said.

On the implications for Veeam from the recently signed VMware/AWS hybrid cloud deal, which sees VMware allowing its customers to easily move their VMware workloads into the public cloud, McKay said: “We piggy-back on VMware customers and they will have to backup their moved AWS cloud workloads, so it’s all good business for us and our partners.”

@AntonySavvas