In the words of Shane Jameson, Systems Engineering Team Leader at Cloud Plus and based out of our Brisbane, Australia office.  Shane has been working with Veeam products for the past 5 years and this was his second time attending VeeamOn, the premier conference on intelligent data management for the hyper-available enterprise.

VeeamOn 2018 took place in Chicago and it was a completely different experience to last year’s crazy festival-type week in New Orleans. This year there was less emphasis on new products or features, and more of an opportunity to catch up on the last year (or so) of changes – such as the Veeam Availability Orchestrator, Veeam Availability Console and Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2.0. The result was that by the end of the week, my confidence was boosted and I felt my passion for Veeam had been totally invigorated.

I also enjoyed having time to meet and chat to people. There were 2200 attendees from around the world, compared to about 3500 last year I believe. This smaller number meant that the Australian contingent was also smaller than last year, but there were benefits to this and I made the most of the good exchange of ideas (and business cards) throughout the 3-day event.

Here are some highlights:

We’re with the right Partner. Veeam boasts a Net Promoter Score that’s 3.5 higher than the industry average.

The first day of the event was focused on Veeam Partners, so I got a lot out of the keynote speeches that day. One of the key things that stood out for me was the announcement that last year Veeam achieved a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 73, which is 3.5 times higher than the industry average and makes Veeam the industry leader in customer satisfaction. For those who aren’t aware, the NPS is calculated by an independent third party and is based on a few different metrics that basically boil down to whether existing customers would be likely to recommend the product and company. Considering that Veeam currently has around 300,000 users it’s hard not to be impressed by such a high result that outstrips the competition by so much.

Vendors are now offering backup and recovery of objects from storage solutions – and soon we will too

The first day rounded out with a great tradeshow / expo, where I was able to chat to some of the storage vendors that are now integrating with Veeam to facilitate backup and recovery of objects from storage snapshots, among other things. This will offer some great opportunities for us to further differentiate the services we offer to our partners and clients.

How Veeam is getting ready for GDPR

The second day of the event was applicable to all attendees, so President and CEO of Veeam, Peter McKay, got down to business again, this time explaining Veeam’s new and improved vision for the organisation. I was really interested to hear how the GDPRs (General Data Protection Regulations) coming into effect this month has affected Veeam. They’ve clearly dedicated a lot of time and energy into ensuring compliance and they have practically had to re-write the software to support this.

Passing the VMCE exam made for a great APAC mixer event that evening!

At lunch time on day two I was able to sit the VMCE exam, which I have been studying for in my spare time. I spoke to so many people who’d failed it the first time around and in fact I couldn‘t find anyone who had passed it first off so I was feeling very nervous. I had also sat a mock exam online and failed that so I was absolutely convinced I would not do well in the real thing. But lo and behold, I was thrilled to find that I passed! So after investigating some of the virtual lab breakout sessions available in the afternoon I was ready to celebrate at the APAC mixer event and casino party that evening.

There is always more to learn and more features to exploit with Veeam

Day three of the event was all about the breakout sessions, and I chose to attend ‘A Sneak Peek at Veeam Backup and Replication 2018 Releases with Anton Gostev’ along with two Veeam Cloud Connect sessions. The sneak peek in particular was great – Anton’s sessions are always the most popular and it was a full house, so the buzz in the room made for a great atmosphere. I am particularly looking forward to the Veeam CDP (Continuous Data Protection) for VM replication  along with NAS backup support and the Scale-Out Backup Repository Archive Tier which will provide greater potential to utilise and make available low-cost archive storage options where appropriate.

Of course, the end of the three-day event was rounded out with a great party that was headlined by a local Chicago band named Mike & Jo as well as some incredible performances by a dance crew called Light Balance – check out www.lightbalance.net if you want to be jealous! This was followed by an unofficial after-party, sharing a few drinks with the other attendees I’d met from Australia.  Someone told me it’s called networking!

The biggest message I took from the conference is that CSP’s like Cloud Plus are only going to grow in importance to our partners and clients in the future.  We look after all of the heavy-lifting work when it comes to infrastructure investment, platform design, management and maintenance, and integration with related services. This makes it simple for our partners to deliver great solutions for their clients that just work – with no unnecessary stress.