Data protection is an exception in the technology market: unlike other segments, it is very rare that it generates movements of concentration of companies. One explanation could be that this branch of software tends to respond to exclusive formats from one or another provider, incompatible with each other, so the conversion difficulties make it uninteresting to acquire a competitor. This does not prevent traditional names from being added periodically by new companies with innovative proposals. In reality, the dynamism in this market comes from the unstoppable growth in the volume of data and new workloads that need to be protected.

“No company in the world could do without a backup solution for its data heritage, but all of them wonder at some point if they are doing it right and are efficiently covering that need,” says Santiago Campuzano, general director of Veeam Software for Spain. , a company that according to the IDC consultancy occupied the first place in the ranking of this market in mid-2022, shared with Dell. Unofficially, IDC estimated the global turnover of Veeam – which is not publicly traded – at around 1.3 billion dollars annually.

It does not seem necessary to add that the data grows incessantly and multiplies until it challenges the installed capacity. But if the practice of backup is universal, how does the demand grow if there are no new users to recruit? “Basically, because existing customers create new loads that need to be protected, which is not always possible with solutions purchased years ago from a provider that may not be reliable,” Campuzano replies.

He clarifies that Veeam does not sell cybersecurity, but data protection (disaster recovery), but it happens that they have become inseparable. The company owes its notoriety and its large installed base to the original decision of its founders, in 2006, to complement with its backup the then rising virtualization technology, which came to replace traditional servers. For this reason, throughout its existence it has been accompanied by the reputation of a preferred partner of VMware, although jealous of its independence. It says it currently has 450,000 customers around the world, in part because it has expanded into the hybrid cloud by developing software similar to the products of leading firms such as Microsoft and Salesforce.

Campuzano maintains that Veeam sells continuity. “What businessman or manager, when reading the news, is not concerned about the strength of their defenses in the face of the possibility that an unpredictable data hijacking paralyzes their activity? We are, pardon the arrogance, the last line of defense for our clients, despite not being present in the cybersecurity market”.

A study published by Veeam (Data protection trends 2022) states that 79% of organizations are aware of having a breach in the protection of their data and 85% have suffered a ransomware attack in the past year. Corollary: 57% are considering upgrading their primary backup solution this year. Furthermore, in 2025, 74% will use some cloud-based data protection service.

Technology has changed since virtualization hit the market. Today, the paradigm is the cloud, and it has introduced the notion of application container (known as Kubernetes), which led to one of Veeam’s episodic acquisitions in 2020, the company Kasten, with which it can combine the protection of physical, virtual or cloud-resident workloads.