Insight Partners, a US-based private equity firm, has agreed to buy Swiss data backup specialist Veeam Software for $5 billion (£3.8 billion).
The acquisition will see Veeam will become a US company “with a US-based leadership team” and is expected to close this quarter.
Veeam specialises in the backup of virtual machines. It is delivered to customers completely via the channel and has strong AWS integrations. Azure and GCP are, Gartner noted in October 2019, “largely a work in progress.”
The move comes amid an ongoing shake-up of the disaster recovery market, with Gartner anticipating that by 2022, 40 percent of organisations will “replace their backup applications from what they deployed at the beginning of 2018.”
The move may unnerve staff, who will have witnessed fellow backup services provider Sungard fall into bankruptcy under private equity ownership, after being saddled with substantial debt. The fund says it plans substantial investment.
(The two differ notably: Veeam has arguably been faster to pivot to the cloud than Sungard and has little focus on traditional disaster recovery like shipping tapes, building out the servers/mainframe/AS400, restoring data/databases.)
Operations VP William H. Largent has been promoted to CEO as part of the deal, with Danny Allan promoted to Chief Technology Officer.
“Veeam has enjoyed rapid global growth over the last decade and we see tremendous opportunity for future growth, particularly in the U.S. market” the new CEO said in a release early Thursday. He added: “We are excited that our current U.S. workforce of more than 1,200 will be expanded and strengthened.”
Veeam’s customer base includes 81 percent of the Fortune 500.
It has been ranked a leader in three consecutive backup and data recovery Magic Quadrants by Gartner, and acording to the latest IDC Software Tracker, is the market-share leader in EMEA and fourth worldwide in its segment, after DellEMC, Veritas and IBM. It recently launched new cloud-native tools to let customers manage, migrate, orchestrate and protect data across AWS and Microsoft Azure environments.
