Today, companies are up in the air about practically everything in information technology. They want to run on-premises, in public cloud, and in private cloud. Innovative new technologies tantalize them, and they change their minds as new products hit the market at a rapid pace. How does a vendor serve this uncertain, constantly shifting market?

Hybrid IT, customers’ dislike of lock-in, and fast-changing trends have influenced Veeam Software Inc.’s entire business strategy.

“We don’t build a long-term roadmap, because the technology is changing so fast that we want to keep that flexibility and agility to change,” said Ratmir Timashev (pictured), co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and corporate development at Veeam. Veeam will disclose plans perhaps six to nine months ahead of time, he added, because the company wants to keep folding new features into its portfolio based on real-world usefulness, not media hype or analyst speculation.

Timashev spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VeeamON event in Miami Beach, Florida. They discussed how Veeam plans to serve hybrid-cloud customers with anti-lock-in data portability (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Picking vendor lock

Customers want to keep their infrastructure options open, according to Timashev. “According to our survey, 73% of our customers are deploying or planing to deploy a hybrid cloud,” he said.

Veeam is developing product capabilities to serve them. Its data backup and protection tools allow users to move data freely among clouds — whether cloud providers themselves like it or not.

“A vendor like AWS or Microsoft will never provide the capability to move the data outside. … But for the true compliance, security, and to avoid the vendor lock-in, you need the capability, not just backup AWS to AWS. But you want to be able to backup AWS to on-prem and on-prem to AWS and AWS to Azure,” he explained.

Next big data management thing

Keeping its roadmap open allows Veeam to offer new features quickly in response to real customer demand. For example, it’s now responding to the increased interest in object storage.

“We believe that object storage is the next cool thing in cloud data management, because it will provide 10 times more capacity at a tenth of the cost and 10 times faster performance,” Timashev concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VeeamON event. (* Disclosure: Veeam Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veeam nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE