Catching up with Veeam's Rick Vanover

[CalvinZito]

I was at Veeam Software's conference this past week in Chicago, VeeamON. One of my IT community friends, Rick Vanover, is the Director of Product Strategy. I used the opportunity to catch up with Rick on what is going on at Veeam in a podcast.

It was a very timely discussion. I heard lots of chatter from others about the keynote at the event - folks who were critical of it. Veeam revealed their strategy which is focused on delivering solutions around the 5 stages of intelligent data management:

1. Backup
2. Aggregation
3. Visibility
4. Orchestration
5. Automation

What Veeam didn't do was have a lot of new product announcements. At past events, Veeam has traditionally used VeeamON to talk about what is coming and have lots of demos during the keynotes to show the latest features to us IT Nerds. 

Last year at VeeamON, they announced 5 major features that would be part of the v10 release (agent support, Universal Storage API, NAS backup, Continous Data Protection, and Archive Tier). I talked about these with Rick last August at VMworld. We are a year later and Veeam hasn't released v10 but has released a few of these features in 9.5 updates. 

Rick took on the delay of some of these features. He was open about what is going on inside of Veeam and his insight as the Director of Product Strategy. In the podcast, we also talked about Veeam setting its sights on the Enterprise. 

Here's the podcast. (or right click to save it)!

To subscribe to the podcast, open this link and click on the "View in iTunes" button under my picture. If you don't use iTunes, you can find my podcast on TalkShoe.com and it has just been added to Google Play Music as well.   

Rick said something around 19 minutes into the podcast that I want to highlight:

I'll go back to HPE. We have arguably the strongest set of end-to-end integration of anyone out there, even competitively where we can take any of those three arrays (3PAR, HPE Nimble Storage, and StoreVirtual) and go to the backup storage targets (StoreOnce) and industry standard solutions as well. 

Watch the keynote for yourself

I have a link to the opening keynote. Bill Philibin, previously the SVP and GM of HPE Storage and now the SVP and CTO of our Hybrid IT Organization had 20 minutes during the keynote. Here's a link to when Bill came onstage. I had taken video of Bill's section but I had a couple of people in front of me who kept leaning in to talk to each other - so I'm glad I found the "professional" version online. 

About the Author

I'm Calvin Zito, a 34 year veteran in the IT industry and have worked in storage for over 25 years. I am an eight-time VMware vExpert. As an early adopter of social media and active in communities, I've blogged for 9 years. You can find me on Twitter as @CalvinZito. If you don't follow me on Twitter, do it now! You can also contact me via email.