The sprawling conference hall at VeeamON 2025 in San Diego was buzzing with activity last week as Veeam Software showcased just how far they’ve come since their early days as a VMware backup specialist. As a tech journalist who’s been covering Veeam since its inception, I found myself reflecting on the company’s remarkable journey while sitting down with Rick Vanover and Michael Cade for an in-depth conversation about where Veeam has been and where they’re headed.
The company that once focused exclusively on VMware backup is now approaching $2 billion in revenue and offers protection for everything from cloud services to Kubernetes clusters. My front-row seat at this year’s event gave me a unique perspective on how Veeam is positioning itself in an increasingly complex data protection landscape.
From Humble Beginnings to Industry Leader
Speaking with Rick and Michael, whom I’ve known for many years, it got me reminiscing of the early early days of VMware when Veeam first appeared. Back in the early days, it was Veeam, Vizioncore’s esxRanger, PhdVirtual, and perhaps one other vendor, all vying for backup dominance when it came to VMware’s VMs.
Rick nodded, reflecting on his own journey with the company. “I joined in November of 2010,” he said. “What sealed the deal for me was VMware.”
The growth since those early days has been nothing short of remarkable. From a small company focused exclusively on VMware backup, Veeam has expanded its portfolio to encompass virtually every aspect of the modern data center.
Michael Cade explained how the company’s focus has evolved over time. “In the early days, the focus was so singular. And now it’s very broadened and different.”
This expansion hasn’t been random or haphazard. Instead, it has followed a clear pattern of growth that aligned with the evolving needs of enterprise customers:
- 2011: Added Hyper-V support
- 2014: Introduced the Windows agent
- 2016: Added Microsoft 365 and the Linux agent
- 2018: Integrated Nutanix support
With each expansion, Veeam has moved further away from its identity as simply a “VMware backup company” and closer to its current position as a comprehensive data management platform.
The Modern Veeam Portfolio: Three Paths to Protection
One of the most significant evolutions in Veeam’s approach has been the development of multiple delivery models for their technology. As Rick explained, there are now three distinct ways customers can consume Veeam’s offerings:
“The story we don’t talk about that much is that Niraj’s products come from a product pipeline from Anton’s team,” Rick said. Those three models are: install and use the software backup and recovery on your own and on-premise; have it managed by a service provider; or consume it through Veeam Data Cloud.
This flexibility allows customers to choose the deployment model that best fits their needs while still accessing the same core technology. “It all starts from this stack,” Rick continued. “It gets reformatted to be used, and there’s environment-specific things we do to make it run in those modes.”
Beyond just delivery models, Veeam’s portfolio has expanded to cover virtually every data source in the modern enterprise. While VMware backups still represent a significant portion of their business, the company now protects:
- Microsoft 365 data
- Multiple hypervisors
- Physical servers
- Enterprise applications
- Kubernetes clusters
- Salesforce
- Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)
As Michael put it, “Our telemetry tells us by far the majority of image-based virtual platform backups are VMs, but now there’s a lot of revenue from M365. There’s a solid percentage of other hypervisors, there’s physical, there’s enterprise apps, and there’s Kubernetes…”
Navigating the “Hypervisor Hunger Games”
Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation centered on how Veeam is helping customers navigate what Michael and Rick colorfully termed the “Hypervisor Hunger Games” – the post-Broadcom acquisition world where many VMware customers are actively exploring alternatives.
“Every conversation is talking about the Hypervisor Hunger Games, whether they’re doing anything right now or not,” Michael explained.
The biggest benefactor here seems to be Microsoft Hyper-V. Proxmox, a somewhat unknown and newcomer to the virtualization world, has grown relative quickly. In fact, right now, it sounded as if there’s more Proxmox environments being protected by Veeam than there is Red Hat and Oracle combined.
When I expressed surprise at Proxmox’s growth considering its enterprise readiness concerns, Rick acknowledged, “No, but it hasn’t superseded Nutanix. It’s just Hyper-V is number one.”
Both Rick and Michael see customer migrations playing out over a multi-year timeline. “I want to look at that three-year window, whatever that would be for a lot of people,” Rick said. “I’ve spoken to organizations that have moved mid-market and below. We have one client at VeeamON who’s going to talk about moving a thousand virtual machines.”
Michael highlighted three common patterns they’re seeing:
- Organizations that have renegotiated their VMware contracts to bridge the next 2-3 years while they plan their migration strategy
- Companies moving to alternative hypervisors like Hyper-V, Proxmox, Nutanix, and KVM variants
- Businesses accelerating their cloud migration plans, moving workloads to public cloud platforms
The conversation revealed an important insight: the VMware ecosystem is about more than just the hypervisor – it includes an entire landscape of integrated tools and vendor relationships. “It’s not just about vSphere,” Michael emphasized. “It’s about the whole ecosystem. It’s about the security partners that integrate into VMware. It’s about backup vendors that integrate into that.”
This ecosystem complexity means migrations come with hidden costs beyond the software itself. “That’s either a cost in functionality and features, or a cost in skill sets,” Michael noted. People have a strong background and a long history with VMware vSphere; and they’ve spent a lot of time learning what that vSphere ecosystem looks like. But then to be thrown into the Hyper-V world, it’s a different wildlife. It just looks and feels different. There is a learning curve.
Beyond Backup: A Platform for Data Intelligence
As Veeam continues to evolve, they’re looking beyond traditional backup and recovery toward becoming a true data intelligence platform. Rick and Michael both emphasized how Veeam is uniquely positioned to help customers extract more value from their data.
“We’ve got a lot of opportunity beyond backup and recovery,” Rick explained. ‘A lot of insights, you know? There’s an incredible data lake for lack of a better word, and we’ve got a lot under management by Veeam… So what can we do with that?’
Michael expanded on this vision: “I think that’s a huge opportunity for us, both from the VDP (Veeam Data Platform) and the VBC (Veeam Backup Copy) side, it’s about helping our customers understand their data, be more hygienic around their data, and almost get into the data life cycle management story.”
This approach goes far beyond simply protecting data – it’s about understanding what data is valuable, what hasn’t been touched in years, and how to make intelligent decisions about where and how to store it. As Michael put it, “We can leverage our intelligence to make better decisions around backing up where we store it – governance, regulation, and compliance – and then be able to use that data once you’ve got it clean.”
The possibilities range from prioritizing recovery of the most important systems to feeding data into AI pipelines for insights. “Now everyone can build a better database because you can use extensions on Postgres, but you can just start building your own RAG or your own agent to be able to interact with that data,” Michael explained.
The SaaS Protection Challenge
Another key theme in our conversation was the growing challenge of protecting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. As more companies move to browser-based applications, protecting that data becomes increasingly important – and many organizations don’t realize their vulnerability.
There’s a common misconception by people that the SaaS applications that they, and their organizations, are using are somehow protected by the SaaS vendors themselves. Many just assume, ‘Oh, it’s in the cloud. It must be backed up.’ And realistically, that just isn’t the case.
Michael highlighted how Veeam is addressing this challenge: “We announced that we’re protecting Salesforce, Entra ID… I think we’re setting up the foundation of how that needs to look from a VDP and a VBC perspective because people want to backup Entra ID as a SaaS offering, a browser offering. They want to be able to protect that using a browser offering.”
Looking to the Future
As our conversation wound down, it became clear that Veeam is well-positioned for the future. Rick pointed to the upcoming capabilities in the next full release of Veeam Data Platform, particularly around instant recovery: “The magic here is instant recovery… the difference is there’s no platform conversion. VMware to VMware, Hyper-V to Hyper-V, that’s the quickest it gets.”
But the most significant advancement might be in cross-platform recovery: “VMware to the cloud changes everything,” Rick emphasized. “We have plumbing in the cloud, but basically there’s about a four-minute process currently… that provides the storage to Azure.”
The demonstrations showcased during the VeeamON Day 2 keynotes showcased, not only this capability, but also “universal CDP” (Continuous Data Protection), further illustrating how Veeam continues to innovate across their entire portfolio.
The Bottom Line
My conversation with Rick Vanover and Michael Cade at VeeamON 2025 revealed a company that has successfully evolved from a single-purpose backup provider to a comprehensive data management leader. What began as a simple VMware backup tool has grown into a platform that protects data across virtually every environment in the modern enterprise.
As Veeam approaches its $2 billion revenue milestone, they’re well-positioned to help customers navigate the complex challenges of modern data protection – from the “Hypervisor Hunger Games” to the rising importance of SaaS backup to the future of data intelligence.
For organizations looking to protect their data in today’s complex, multi-platform world, Veeam’s evolution offers a compelling blueprint for comprehensive data resilience. And as the data landscape continues to evolve, it’s clear that Veeam plans to remain at the forefront of that transformation.
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