KIRKLAND, Wash. — Credit the cloud, and the talent. The cricket is just a bonus.
Veeam Software, the top company by market share in data protection and ransomware recovery, has officially shifted its corporate headquarters from Columbus, Ohio, to the Seattle area, drawn by the close proximity of the major cloud providers and the deep pool of technical talent.
Its new home in Kirkland’s Carillon Point is part of a new era for the company. Veeam moved its headquarters from Switzerland to the United States following its March 2020 acquisition by private equity firm Insight Partners — a deal that valued the company at $5 billion.
Anand Eswaran, who joined Veeam as CEO in December 2021, previously worked out of Redmond as the corporate vice president of Microsoft Enterprise. After joining RingCentral as president and chief operating officer in January 2020, he ended up remaining in the region, rather than moving to the Bay Area, due to the pandemic.
“The plan was always to shift the center of gravity here,” Eswaran said in an interview at Veeam’s new headquarters. “At the end of the day, when you look at talent, when you look at core tech skills, when you look at the innovation landscape, our most significant partners are based here, as well — it just made sense.”
Veeam and Microsoft recently extended their strategic partnership with a five-year agreement to jointly develop AI solutions, integrating Veeam’s products with Microsoft Copilot and other AI services, while also jointly selling Veeam Data Cloud with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.
The company also partners with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Oracle, among others.
Veeam has more than 5,000 employees globally, in 50 countries, with U.S. offices in Ohio, New York, Georgia and Arizona. So far, the company has about 50 employees in the Seattle area, with plans to continue growing.
Beyond the market for data protection, the name “Veeam” might ring a bell for cricket fans.
The company sponsors the Seattle Orcas, the region’s new Major League Cricket franchise. Eswaran said the sponsorship goes hand-in-hand with its headquarters move and growing presence in the Seattle region.
Veeam has a full floor at Carillon Point, with the potential to expand in the future. The office includes a large executive briefing center. One benefit of the new space, including the proximity to the major cloud providers, is that customers and partners visiting the region can spend time at Veeam, as well.
Other key execs based in Kirkland include Matthew Bishop, chief operating officer, who was previously a Microsoft corporate vice president of worldwide commercial strategy and operations, and chief digital officer at RingCentral.
The market for cloud services is increasingly evolving into marketplaces, with customers seeking to use their vendor relationships with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud to buy related services, Bishop explained. The proximity to the major cloud providers strengthens those relationships as those marketplaces become more significant to adoption.
In a report last year, IDC ranked Veeam as the top company in data replication and protection by market share, ahead of competitors including Dell, IBM, Veritas, Commvault, and others.
An August 2023 report by Gartner ranked Veeam as a leader based on its ability to execute, its customer growth and retention, its hybrid and multicloud support, and its large network of partners. Gartner cited “cautions” including what it described as Veeam’s slow response to key market trends, and overall complexity of managing its technology.
Earlier this month, Veeam surpassed $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue for the first time.
The company’s growth underscores the growing focus on data protection and backup amid the rise of ransomware and other cyber threats. Veeam’s features include backup of virtual, physical, and cloud-based machines, with a variety of services for data protection, restoration, and recovery from attacks, including testing and verification.
Eswaran cited several key findings from Veeam’s 2024 Data Protection Trends Report, released in January based on a survey of 1,200 IT leaders and professionals in late 2023:
- 75% of companies experienced at least one ransomware attack in the last 12 months.
- 25% experienced four or more attacks in the last 12 months.
- 80% of companies paid the ransom, but 25% still couldn’t retrieve their data.
AI has changed the dynamics on both sides of the ransomware equation.
“It has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to being a bad actor. Anyone can create malicious code pretty quickly and try to do something with it,” Eswaran said. “It’s made the bad actors, the bigger ones, way more sophisticated.”
But AI has also bolstered the defense side, he said, helping Veeam mitigate ransomware risks through techniques like threat detection, malware analysis, and ensuring clean backups during the recovery process.
As for cricket, Eswaran grew up in India and is friends with members of the Orcas ownership group, which includes tech leaders such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Madrona Venture Group Managing Director S. Soma Somasegar; Icertis co-founder and CEO Samir Bodas; and GreatPoint Ventures managing partner Ashok Krishnamurthi.
The Orcas ownership group is working to bring a cricket grounds to Marymoor Park in Redmond.
“To watch the best of the best players in the world come and play here, for people like us who have grown up watching cricket, playing cricket, this is an absolute dream come true,” Eswaran said.
