Remaining relevant in a changing world – Rick Vanover – Ep28

One of the biggest challenges we face in technology is constant change. Change is not bad of course, but it presents challenges, from upgrading operating systems and applications, to integrating the latest technology advancements, to responding to new business problems and opportunities.

But it is not only those implementing and managing technology who are affected.

Technology vendors are equally effected, the IT industry is full of stories of companies who had great technologies but have then been blindsided by a shift in the needs of their customer base, or a technology trend that they failed to anticipate.

It was with this in mind that I visited Veeam’s, VeeamON conference.

Veeam are a technology success story, a vendor who arrived into the already established data protection market and shifted how people looked at it. They recognised the impact virtualisation was having on how organisations of all types where deploying their infrastructures and how traditional protection technologies where failing to evolve to meet these new needs.

Veeam changed this and that is reflected in their tremendous success over the last 9 years, today they are a $600M+ company, with 100’s of thousands of customers. But the world is now changing for them also, as we start to move more workloads to the cloud, as we want more value from our data, as security starts to impact every technology design decision, and of course as we all live ever more digitally focussed lives, our needs from our systems are changing hugely.

How are Veeam going to react to that ?, what are they going to do to continue the success they’ve had and to remain relevant in the new world that much of their market is shifting into ?.

For this week’s podcast, I look at that very question and discuss Veeam’s future with Rick Vanover, Director of Technical Product Marketing & Evangelism, Rick is a well-known industry face and voice, and we had an excellent conversation looking at Veeam’s future aims.

We discuss their repositioning as an availability company, look at how Veeam are developing a range of solutions to give them an availability platform and how this platform will allow their customers to build a strategy, to not only protect their critical data assets, in a range of different data repositories, but will also allow them to move their data seamlessly between them.

We also take a look at some of the big announcements from the show and pick out our top new features.

In my opinion, Veeam’s strategic vision is a good one, the ability to provide organisations with the data protection they need regardless of data location and the ability to move data between those locations is important, but, as ever, remaining relevant will be dictated by their ability to execute that vision.

Hope you enjoy the show.

To find more about Veeam you can of course check out their website www.veeam.com and engage with them on twitter @veeam and if you want to catch up with Rick, he can also be found on twitter @RickVanover.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be looking more at availability and protection, as we talk with the wider technology community as well as industry analysts on how they see the evolving data market.

To catch those shows then subscribe in all the normal ways.

Oh and I hope you like the new theme tune!

Thanks for listening.