So we're here at Veeamon 2017.
I'm speaking with Ratmir Timachev, who you're now the co-founder.
We had talked over the course of the last two Veeamons and your role has changed a little
bit.
Can you tell me a little bit about that change in your role and what you're doing now?
Yeah, absolutely.
So historically, we had a separation in our company.
So I have a partner.
His name is Andrey Bernov.
And Andrey is mostly focused on the product and market strategy.
So together we define where to take the company, what's the next big opportunity.
Then he goes and does the his product.
And I do mostly sales and marketing and go-to-market strategy.
That has worked very well for us in the last 10 years.
But at some point in the last couple of years, I realized that company is getting bigger,
more complex.
And probably there are some people that are much better in sales and marketing and overall
go-to-market strategy than me.
So when company evolves, there is this period in the history of the company, any company,
I believe, where the founder has to take on a different role.
And it's good to realize that sometimes there are some people that are better than you doing
something.
So I realized that.
So I started looking around.
And for me, the requirement was to find the person who not only has big company experience,
knows how to take the company into one billion and beyond.
Maybe even the next target would be 2 billion or 5 billion.
But also who has a startup mentality, what we call a founder's mentality.
So who basically feels that he owns the business and he owns all the aspects.
So the concepts like budget doesn't exist in startup, right?
So if it's the right thing, we will do it, right?
So it took me some time to find that person.
So I wanted the person who has specifically had a track record of success, multiple successes
at big companies and startups.
And I found that person.
And that was Peter McKay.
Then it took me probably 18 months to convince him to come over.
So I've done some recruiting.
Peter has great experience in building a couple of great startup companies.
The first one, Watchwire, he sold to IBM, great company in the security space.
And he worked for IBM and has been very successful at IBM, stayed a few years at IBM.
And then he went and got recruited to run another small startup in desktop virtualization space,
desktop.
And then he built that company and sold it to VMware, stayed at VMware and played very
important large role at VMware, running sales and marketing for Americas, being responsible
for 3.5 billion in revenue.
So I kind of thought that this kind of person that understands our market, understands the
data center, the cloud market, understands the ecosystem, understands the channel, but
also is very strong in the enterprise, plus has the successful track record with startups,
a great leader, a great team builder, great motivator, very driven.
I thought that we are moving very fast, but Peter came on board and we are moving even
10 times faster now.
Well I think on top of all those things that you just said, he's also very charismatic.
I think he did a great job in the keynote.
Some people are just natural born speakers.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
So in the last 10 months, Peter has done fantastic job building, strengthening the team, accelerating
the growth and we decided to promote Peter to co-CEO.
Also at the same time, we decided to promote Andrew to co-CEO because effectively he has
been playing this role on the product side.
So there are two parts of the business, the product and the sales and marketing.
So we factually documented what in reality we have in place.
My role going forward would be more, I'm glad that now I have, I'm traveling much less
late.
So I used to travel 50% now, probably still meeting with customers and partners, understanding
the market and looking for investments, thinking more about longer term strategy and looking
at investments and acquisitions to accelerate our growth.
That's my function primarily as the board member.
But again, I'm 100% committed to Veeam.
I'm not going anywhere.
I'm not starting a new company.
I'm 100% committed to Veeam.
Well, I think that's one of the great things I like about Veeam is that you guys have so
much energy and you still have that feel of a small company, even though you guys are
growing like wildfire.
Yeah, for us it's very important and with Peter it was a cultural feat in that regards
as well.
So the passion and the drive for what we do is what Peter takes to the next level.
Can we talk a little bit about some of the new features and some of the things that you're
excited about?
Yeah, so in the last 10 years Veeam has established itself as the leader in the traditional, not
traditional but modern virtualized data center on-prem.
In the next five years our goal is to establish ourselves the leader in the cloud, cloud data
management and cloud data protection.
So all the features that we're adding towards our vision for the multi-cloud and hybrid
cloud world where we believe that the service availability which we provide is extremely
important.
The service availability to support what we call our digital life.
So all businesses are developing new products based on the need of their customers and all
these products are digital most of it, right?
So we need to help businesses to make sure that digital products are always available.
Digital products and digital services are always available.
That's Veeam business to provide availability and data protection in this multi-cloud world.
We are very excited about version 10 coming out later by the end of this year or early
next year.
There is lots of features around cloud, around Azure, around AWS as well as there are lots
of features for our service providers who are building the backup as a service and disaster
recovery as a service.
We see this as a big opportunity as well.
Also we are expanding our product from being just a product to a data management platform.
We are opening more APIs.
So we announced the new API storage, API framework and we are integrating with additional strategic
storage vendors IBM, Lenovo and Infinidot in addition to our existing partnership with
Cisco, HP, HP Enterprise, NetApp and Dell EMC.
So we are expanding our ecosystem of storage vendors but this time we are expanding using
our API framework, not just integrating manually but using our, so we are announcing.
Also we are opening more APIs in our platform for other vendors.
So we announced a few partnerships as well.
One of them is N2W software.
It's a company that specializes in building data protection just specifically for Amazon
workloads.
So we are going to have a new product built together based on their technology and our
technology is called Veeam Idealability for AWS.
Provides complete end-to-end data protection and backup for AWS workloads.
Also we announced partnership with two other companies Starwind that provides virtual tape
library to take out backups and archive them in Amazon AWS.
Also another partnership with Data Gravity to provide deeper analytics into our data
visibility as well as help with the security, things like ransomware and things like that.
So again, very excited about version 10, lots of great features, a lot of focus on enterprise
on the feature perspective, support for physical service, so we are expanding not just being
virtualized, virtual environment, but now we are going to support physical native way
out of the box from the same interface with our agent, new agent technology and support
for network attached storage and other great features coming in version 10.
So lots of focus on the enterprise features, lots of focus on expanding the platform,
not just the point solution, but the platform overall data management platform and a lot
of focus on the cloud and on our service providers.
Now with the API, is that going to allow any company who is a storage company to use that
and incorporate it into their product or is it sort of like you choose the partners that
you want to allow access into it?
Yeah, basically it allows for the partner to do all the work.
Before that, all the work was done by us, by manual integration.
Now still as any company, we have to approve it and we have to certify that solution, right?
So we are not going to give access to APIs, but now all the hard work, R&D work, goes
into the partner, I mean still.
So before that, we've done all the integration, now the partner will contribute a lot into
the integration.
So that's great, it's going to allow you to expand that?
Yeah, and do this integration because we have very, very good, deep, close integration.
So it takes time, that's why we've done one at a time.
So first it was HP, then NetApp and EMC and Cisco, so it takes time for this deep integration.
Now we can have these integrations faster and there will be more news coming in the
next few weeks with other storage vendors, great news with our storage and hyperconverged
vendors, the additional partnerships.
Great.
Well, thank you Ratmir for taking the time to speak with me on the blog and we wish you
success in the future and look forward to seeing you again next year.
Absolutely, thanks for coming over, great seeing you.
