Veeam Co-Founder: 'Not a Single Reason' To Sell the Company

A standard reaction to a private company sharing fairly specific financial results on a regular basis is to assume that they're trying to attract a buyer, but Veeam Software's co-founder insists that's not the case.

"What are the reasons for us to sell? We are fast-growing, we have a great market. There is not a single reason. And we don't have venture capitalists. They don't need the exits, they are not pushing us for the exits," said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam's co-founder and senior vice president for marketing and corporate development, during an executive roundtable at VeeamOn 2018 on Monday. The show runs through Wednesday in Chicago.

In late April, Veeam announced that the first quarter of 2018 was its 39th straight quarter of record bookings growth. The company claimed 21 percent growth year-over-year and said it was on track to become a $1 billion company (by revenues) in 2018. In a graphic shown to partners earlier in the day, Veeam told partners it was a $200 million company in 2012, was on track to hit $1.1 billion in 2018, and was aiming for $1.5 billion in 2020.

Sitting next to Timashev on stage, Co-CEO and President Peter McKay tackled the related question of whether Veeam was looking to go public.

"Why do you go public? You need cash. We don't need cash. You want some liquidity for investors? Our investors don't need liquidity," said McKay, adding that the company had "blinders on" and was focused on building the company.

Timashev took up the blinders comment and stretched the timetable. "Our goal is to build the company at least for the next 10 years -- dominate the multi-cloud and what's going to come after multi-cloud."

At VeeamOn, the company is rolling out a new branding to reach a larger total addressable market. The company is moving from its recent tagline of "availability for the always-on enterprise" to "intelligent data management for the hyper-available enterprise."

McKay walked partners through a simplified Veeam history in an earlier keynote, saying the company was about virtual machine backup from its founding in 2006, recovery in 2010, availability last year and hyper-availability now. He defined hyper-availability as the need to protect and make available data that is critical to the business, growing exponentially and sprawling across locations that include physical datacenters, virtual datacenters, public clouds and SaaS applications.

Timashev said the current battle in the industry is to dominate multi-cloud, that portion of the sprawling infrastructure that includes providing availability for services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud.

"We won the first battle in the new modern datacenter. The next battle for the next five years is going to be multi-cloud," said Timashev.

A big component of Veeam's multi-cloud push came in January when it made its first acquisition in 10 years with the all-cash purchase of N2WS, a provider of cloud-native enterprise backup and recovery for AWS.

As validation of the potential of the larger multi-cloud market, the executives said the AWS administrator who buys an N2WS solution is different from the buyer of Veeam's other solutions.

"They're targeting a slightly different buyer, they are targeting the AWS buyer," Timashev of N2WS. "If we are selling to a centralized IT person, N2WS technology will be part of our solution. In a couple of years, this AWS admin will become part of the central IT.

McKay said the difference was confirmed for Veeam at an N2WS booth at a recent cloud show. "We're hearing the name of all of our customers, and they didn't know who we were. This cloud world is a different buyer," McKay said.

With Veeam not looking to sell, McKay addressed whether the company was looking to buy other companies in the newly strategic areas of backup and recovery software for Azure, Google, IBM Cloud and for key SaaS applications. He suggested that while the next acquisition might not take another 10 years, the company also wouldn't be snapping up a lot of companies at once.

"We zero in on our market and what we do. If we're going to expand, we're going to expand at the right time, in a digestible fashion," McKay said, adding that the company wants to strike the right balance. "We feel like [we have the] best engineering, R&D, but there's a time to market, there's a time to buy."

Pictured: Veeam President Peter McKay (left) and Veeam Co-Founder Ratmir Timashev.

Posted by Scott Bekker on 05/15/2018 at 9:51 AM