Data protection software company Veeam has hired RingCentral and Microsoft veteran Anand Eswaran to succeed Bill Largent as CEO.
Private equity firm Insight Partners acquired Veeam at a $5 billion valuation in March 2020. Fast forward to this year, and Veeam has crossed the $1 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark for 2021. It sounds like Eswaran has arrived to march Veeam toward a potential IPO.
Veeam certainly is growing, but the company faces intense competition from dozens of cloud- and MSP-focused data protection companies, many of which focus on various SMB, midmarket and enterprise opportunities.
Who Is Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran?
Eswaran's experience includes key posts at RingCentral, Microsoft and SAP. According to a bio shared by Veeam:
- At RingCentral, Eswaran led Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Services, Customer Care, Operations, IT, and Human Resources.
- At Microsoft, Eswaran was responsible for the company's Enterprise Commercial and Public Sector business globally; earlier, he led Microsoft Services, Industry Solutions, Digital, Customer Care, and Customer Success — a global team of 24,000 professionals.
- At SAP, he was Executive Vice President of the $5.4B Global Services business, leading 17,000 business process and technology professionals.
- Earlier posts included roles at HP, Vignette and Braun Consulting.
Veeam CEO Transition: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement about the CEO transition, Largent said:
“The data management landscape is evolving at an exponential pace. Veeam is the unequivocal market leader, and is the most trusted partner to help customers securely navigate the complexity of protecting their data to keep their business running; to bolster this position we continue to challenge the status quo, innovate, and ensure we are anticipating customer needs. I am excited to welcome Anand as Veeam’s new CEO. Anand brings extensive experience in developing new business models, executing on market expansion and driving growth with an inclusive purpose-led and people-first culture. To have someone with Anand’s experience on board will lead us into a new era of success, as we further accelerate into the cloud and evaluate the opportunity for Veeam to be a publicly traded company in the future.”
Added Eswaran:
“Veeam is a unique company that is growing significantly faster than the market. I am delighted to be joining such a talented team at an exciting time in its journey. Data is exploding and has become one of the most important assets for all organizations. As such, data management, security and protection are pivotal to the way organizations operate today, and failure to have a robust strategy can be catastrophic. Veeam has a unique opportunity to break away as we sit in the middle of the data ecosystem, with the most robust ransomware protection and ability to protect data wherever it may reside.”
About Veeam's Owner: Private Equity Firm Insight Partners
Meanwhile, Insight Partners has been a dominant investor in the cloud backup and disaster recovery market.
Indeed, Insight Partners also owns stakes in such backup, data protection, cybersecurity and cloud management companies as CoreView, Kaseya (owner of Unitrends and Spanning), OwnBackup and Rewind.
