A couple of weeks ago in Chicago Veeam had their annual tech conference VeeamON, it was one of my favourite shows from last year, unfortunately I couldn’t make it out this time but did catch up remotely and shared my thoughts on some of the strategic messages that where covered in a recent blog post looking at Veeam’s evolving data management strategy ( Getting your VeeamON!).

That strategic Veeam message is an interesting one and their shift from “backup” company to one focused on intelligent data management across multiple repositories is, in my opinion, exactly the right move to be making. With that in mind, I wanted to take a final look at some of those messages as well as some of the other interesting announcements from the show and that is exactly what we do on this week’s podcast, as I’m joined by recurring Tech Interviews guest, Michael Cade, Global Technologist at Veeam.

Michael, who not only attended the show but also delivered some great sessions, joins me to discuss a range of topics. We start by taking a look at Veeam’s last 12 months and how they’ve started to deliver a wider range of capabilities which builds on their virtual platform heritage with support for more traditional enterprise platforms.

Michael shares some of the thinking behind Veeam’s goal to deliver an availability platform to meet the demands of modern business data infrastructures, be they on-prem, in the cloud, SaaS or service provider based. We also look at how this platform needs to offer more than just the ability to “back stuff up”

We discuss the development of Veeam’s 5 pillars of intelligent data management, a key strategic announcement from the show and how this can be used as a maturity model against which you can compare your own progress to a more intelligent way of managing your data.

We look at the importance of automation in our future data strategies and how this is not only important technically, but also commercially as businesses need to deploy and deliver much more quickly than before.

We finish up by investigating the value of data labs and how crucial the ability to get more value from your backup data is becoming, be it to carry out test, dev, data analytics or a whole range of other tasks without impacting your production platforms or wasting the valuable resource in your backup data sets.

Finally, we take a look at some of the things we can expect from Veeam in the upcoming months.

You can catch up on the event keynote on Veeam’s YouTube channel https://youtu.be/ozNndY1v-8g

You can also find more information on the announcements on Veeam’s website here www.veeam.com/veeamon/announcements

If you’d like to catch up with thoughts from the Veeam Vanguard team, you can find a list of them on twitter – https://twitter.com/k00laidIT/lists/veeam-vanguards-2018

You can follow Michael on twitter @MichaelCade1 and on his excellent blog https://vzilla.co.uk/

Thanks for listening.