Founded in April 2006 by the founders of Aelita Software, Veeam Software is a privately held, self-funded startup that aims to manage VMware virtual machines. Its Monitor, Configurator and forthcoming Backup products offer a good range of features, and a cost-effective offshore development lab helps Veeam keep its expenses in check.

Impact assessment

The message - The latest venture from the founders of Aelita Software, Veeam offers configuration, monitoring and backup tools for VMware-hosted virtual machines.
Competitive landscape - The number one rival is Vizioncore, with Hyperic, Netuitive, Nimsoft, ToutVirtual and Virtugo in the game as well.
The 451 Assessment - The two approaches to virtual machine management are automation and traditional systems administration. Given the founders' background with Aelita, it's not surprising that Veeam tends to take the second line, but Configurator has some automation functionality as well. Both approaches are useful and complementary. 

Context

Ratmir Timashev first came to Cleveland from Russia in the 90s, attending Ohio State University and obtaining a master's degree in chemical engineering. By the mid-90s he and his friend Andrei Baronov were running an Internet store and coming up hard against the limitations of Windows NT as a server platform. This led, in 1997, to the founding of Aelita Software as a way of addressing Windows NT's deficiencies. Aelita was sold to Quest Software for $115m in 2004. Timashev and Baronov stayed at Quest for a while, but eventually the temptations of entrepreneurship overcame them, and they established their own venture fund, ABRT Venture Fund.

The first post-Quest startup, Amust Software, was aimed at the consumer market. Veeam is the founders' latest effort to recapture the enterprise success of Aelita, this time by managing virtual machines rather than Windows NT. Despite this long family history, there is no financial relationship between Veeam and Quest. On the contrary, Quest is the majority owner of one of Veeam's principal competitors, Vizioncore. Veeam remains privately held and self-funded, with 40 employees at offices in Cleveland and St. Petersburg. Research and development remains reasonably cost-effective in Russia, comparable to Canada, the founders say. Labor is cheaper in China and India but, they argue, not as highly skilled.

Strategy

Server virtualization is obviously becoming mainstream and growing fast. With virtual machines proliferating, there's increasing debate about how best to give systems administrators the tools they need to manage VM sprawl. One school of thought argues for datacenter and process automation. The other, to which Veeam belongs, brings traditional systems management tools to the virtual realm. We believe both approaches will turn out to be useful – indeed, complementary.

Products

Veeam's portfolio includes four products, with a fifth – Veeam Backup – ready for preview at VMworld. First up is the freeware FastSCP. ESX has no FTP server, so file copying is usually done through secure copy (SCP) over Secure Shell (SSH). SSH encrypts and decrypts data in transit, and it doesn't have compression features; as a result, conventional SCP is a bit slow. Veeam claims FastSCP can do the same jobs in a sixth of the time. It lets users copy files from Windows to ESX, ESX to Windows or ESX to ESX. It can be used for backing up existing VMs or copying VMs and templates between ESX servers. The company says FastSCP has been downloaded 15,000 times.

Next comes Reporter, which collects information about the customers' VMware Infrastructure 3 environment, including components and configuration settings. It uses this data to generate reports for analysis (in Visio) and documentation (in Excel, Word or PDF). Reporter is integrated with ESX Server and VirtualCenter and is designed for use by ESX administrators, systems integrations and datacenter operators.

Veeam's third product is Configurator, a Windows GUI interface and set of expert knowledge packs designed to automate and streamline virtual server configuration. It integrates with and extends VirtualCenter, adding its pre-written expert modules to lower the learning curve and eliminate the need for custom scripting. The expert modules include one that lets users enable or disable remote root access (ESX Server 3 comes with SSH disabled by default); one that checks, modifies and applies the correct time to all ESX servers in the environment; one for patch levels; one for diagnostics; and one for running custom scripts.

Fourth is Veeam Monitor, which looks at deployment planning and performance troubleshooting of VMs on VMware Server. An ESX port is going into beta. Monitor aims to fill the gap between monitoring products written for physical environments, monitors that pick up a limited set of VMware-specific parameters and built-in tools like VMware Management Interface. Monitor provides VMware-focused data collection with data on resource use to help with planning new VM deployment. A simple drill-down interface is designed to help with troubleshooting.

Competition

Quest, as we've seen, owns a majority share in Vizioncore. Veeam Backup will compete with Vizioncore's esxRanger Pro, and Veeam's Monitor already competes with esxCharter. Monitor also faces at least three physical-world products that have been retrofitted for virtual machines – Hyperic HQ for VMware, Netuitive for Virtualization and Nimsoft NimBUS for VMware – and at least two more VM-specific monitoring tools, ToutVirtual VirtualIQ Pro and Virtugo Software Perform.

SWOT analysis

Strengths: Monitor will be available for ESX soon, Backup is about to be announced and Configurator has some neat automation functions. The portfolio is nicely varied, and Russian R&D helps contain costs.

Weaknesses: The company is only beginning to be known, and self-funding doesn't leave a lot of budget available for marketing.

Opportunities: So bullish are we on the market for virtual machine management, we're dedicating our next enterprise software major report to it.

Threats: Vizioncore and even ToutVirtual are far better known, and Hyperic, Netuitive and Nimsoft have physical-world businesses as well.