Veeam Software Inc. today unveiled enhancements for its data protection software and a new partner program aimed at giving it a competitive boost as it enters a new stage of growth.

Switzerland-based Veeam is a major player in the data protection market with more than 350,000 customers worldwide. Most of those are small and midsized businesses, but the company also has a presence in other segments such as the public sector. It sells a suite of tools that help organizations protect the workloads in their various technology environments against outages.

At its VeeamON customer event in Florida today, Veeam unveiled a new release of Availability Orchestrator, the offering that serves as the automation layer for its core data protection tools. It enables administrators to create automated workflows for restoring applications in the event of an outage. The update adds features meant to reduce the amount of time it takes to get a workload up and running after it goes offline.

Administrators can now instantly restore virtual machines powered by vSphere, VMware Inc.’s market-leading virtualization software, thanks to a new high-speed recovery mechanism. Availability Orchestrator launches virtual machines directly from backups to speed up the restoration process. Moreover, it automatically deploys restored applications in a fallback location to make sure that users can continue their work while the outage is being fixed.

Veeam has also enhanced Availability Orchestrator’s reporting capabilities. The tool now enables administrators to audit recovery workflows to check they work as intended, as well as make them accessible to application development teams and other relevant stakeholders.

Alongside the new release of Availability Orchestrator, Veeam pulled back the curtains on a new partner program. The “with Veeam” program allows storage and hyperconverged infrastructure appliance makers to bake its data protection software directly into their systems. The company’s goal is provide more consumption options for organizations looking to adopt its products.

Nutanix Inc. and ExaGrid Systems Inc. are the first two partners in the program. Nutanix has integrated Veeam’s technology with the Mine appliance it introduced earlier this month, while ExaGrid added support to its ExaGrid Backup data protection system.

These latest updates should put Veeam in a better position to maintain its growth. The company said today that it has passed $1 billion in annual bookings and is now adding 4,000 new customers a month, milestones that follow a $500 million funding round earlier this year.

Photo: Veeam