INTERVIEW
AIMING FOR THE TOP SLOT IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, VEEAM’S CEO BILL LARGENT AND CMO JIM KRUGER SHARE THEIR PLANS TO BECOME THE LARGEST BACKUP AND RECOVERY SOLUTIONS PROVIDER.
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an you share some key learnings you have learned during this pandemic? Bill: You’d expect us to say that we’ve had a challenging year with devastating effects. But that’s not it. It’s posed a challenge to people and lives, of course. However, it has not had a negative impact on our business at all. Our business has continued to grow. Things were a little bit rocky in the MarchApril timeframe of 2020, but we made the transition quickly. The learning piece was moving everybody to remote/ home working. Of the 4,400 of our employees, half of them were already working out of their homes before the pandemic. The other half we had to move. That was a big deal. R&D and customer support teams had to work from home. Now we are taking certain groups – for example, our order entry group for all of the Americas – and move them out of the office permanently to work out of their homes. And we’ll use weekly or bi-weekly meetings in the office and host events to boost morale and foster team spirit. The learning for us from all of this is to be versatile, which to be honest, we have always been that way. We’ve always operated in a virtual environment. Do you have a 100% remote workforce now, or is it hybrid? Bill: At present, we are 100% remote. We have offices open, and employees can go in and utilise the offices if they so wish. But we are about to change that. Around the first week of July, we will bring back the customer support team into our US,
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CXO INSIGHT ME
JUNE 2021
Bill Largent
Russian, and Prague offices. Most of the inhibitors right now are governments saying, “No! If you can work from home, then work from home.” And that puts pressure on businesses, but we will bring some groups back to the office soon. Are you seeing any significant shift in the investment priorities of your customers? Do they now understand the role of backup and recovery in business continuity planning? Jim: We definitely see strong demand as a result of many companies starting to move to the cloud and looking for efficiencies there. From a cybersecurity perspective, we have seen an increase in ransomware attacks, and these trends continue to push data protection higher on the priority list. We have certainly seen this from our results from the second half
of last year and the first quarter of this year. And if you have the right solution with a broad and future-proof platform to satisfy customer needs across all environments – from cloud to physical to virtual to SaaS to Kubernetes – as Veeam does, we see strong uptake. We had a strong showing with double-digit growth with annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 25% year-over-year (YoY) for Q1’21. And in the second half of last year, according to IDC and all the market stats, we grew about 18%. The overall market average growth rate was 0.4%. So we gained significant market share. We moved from #3 in the world to #2, the first time in the company’s history, and we now have our sights on #1. Bill: From our potential clients, we see different points of view. One we are
