Veeam 100 Summit 2023

As I sit here sipping my coffee, finally over the jet lag of the past couple of weeks, I find myself reflecting on the recent Veeam 100 Summit in Prague, Czech Republic. As always the event is an interesting and wonderful mix of community, technology and culture. This year the attendee list grew to an impressive 161 attendees between Veeam Vanguards, Legends, MVPs and other staff from their product management teams leading to insight into how decisions are made and lively discussion regarding their products.

In this post I’m going to focus on the technology (that can be discussed) presented and what makes Veeam’s community special and truly unique.

Technology

This year the content largely focused on 2023 2H releases that will begin trickling out in the next month or so. Showing their cards a little bit the week before Summit Veeam held their Veeam Resiliency Summit, highlighting the focus not only of Veeam but of the industry on the intersection of backup/disaster recovery and information security. As we saw repeatedly at Summit the focus of all products but especially the Veeam Data Platform 12.1 release (encompassing Veeam Backup and Replication, VeeamONE and Veeam Orchestrator) is how can the products impact your information security stance and specifically tie into the NIST framework.

I’ll say that Veeam is not alone in this pursuit (see my next post) but they are decidedly a leader into that capability and are doing some interesting things with it. Most interesting to me is they are going to start supporting KMS integration for backup encryption key management. This has long been a concern with any backup’s encryption and it is a welcome change for those who know how to utilize it. Also very interesting is their approach towards recognizing if a server has been hit with ransomware and then tracing that back to a “known good” backup. This should assist SysAdmins in recovering more quickly.

There was also quite a bit of content specifically for their Service Provider representatives. As the Vanguard and other programs have matured and with it many of our careers there has been a large shift of members from end user customers to either Service Provider or partner vendor employees. As such the VCSP content was a highlight of the week for me, especially with the recent acquisition by Veeam of CT4’s Cirrus platform and what we could learn more about that.

Community

As always Veeam does community and events well, arguably better than anybody else in the industry. While others may bring in big name rap acts to their conference parties or do glitzy announcements, Veeam does an impeccable job of finding their people and creating a two way street of communication between them and the company. This only works because the group is kept relatively tight but even with that necessary limitation they’ve managed to grow the group year over year. This past year they’ve made a point of providing paid trips to not only Summit but also VeeamON 2023 with many of us also having speaking slots in Miami in May.

This involvement leads many of us to have an inherent trust in the company, one that leads to a career long “stickiness” as opposed to this employer or that. The community member gets knowledge, opportunities and a basis for career advancement, Veeam gets feedback, evangelism and innovation ideas that no expensive party will ever create.

Conclusion

This year concluded my 3rd trip to named Vanguard/Veeam 100 Summit. I’ll go ahead and count VeeamON 2015 as the “O.G.” Event as we had an extra day and the first AMA as part of it. In any event this event continues to set the standard for what a vendor community event can and should be. Thank you Veeam once again for having me, until next time!

PS: My friend Al Rasheed has done an excellent job of capturing many of the recap posts/content related to this year’s Summit, be sure to check out his post if you’d like to learn more about the event.