Transcript
theCUBE's continuous coverage of VeeamON 2026. My name is Dave Vellante, here with my co-host, Krista Case. Anand Eswaran is here, CEO of Veeam. Welcome back, good to see you again on theCUBE. Awesome. Always a pleasure to be here, Dave. Lovely to see you, Krista. Lovely to see you as always. Right off the keynote, very strategic keynote. You're such a clear thinker. You basically laid out the data and AI trust infrastructure, the missing piece. Veeam wants to be that missing piece. When did that sort of epiphany hit you, that that was needed? Was it kind of right after ChatGPT came out? Did it take a while to bake? Was it through conversations with customers? Because it's such a major pivot, the entire market. How did that come about? Great question, Dave. I think the first thing was when the agentic era, sort of the proliferation of AI started, the pivot from machine learning to AI, we started to see what we need to do as a company to capture that wave as well. So those learnings were actually the first instances of us realizing that if we don't have the right data, if we don't have data we can trust, if we don't have data which have the right entitlements, permissions, traveling with the data in, then no matter what agentic applications we put in, we were not getting to the right outcome. And then we saw that repeated many times at every customer. So this was really the thesis and the learnings which went to say we need to solve this problem nobody is talking about, which is the data and AI trust layer which sits above the data fabric, the snowflakes of the world, which is key because if you don't have that layer, everything about it, from the model layer to the agent orchestration layer is not going to work. That was a thesis behind which we actually went and bought security AI as well in the first place. So the thesis led to the acquisition, led to the new strategy. So Veeam was, to my recollection, the first to protect SaaS applications. You started with Microsoft 365, I think you went on to Salesforce. The market wasn't that big at the time, you had to do some education. We're going through a similar, but orders of magnitude bigger transition now. You laid it out very well in your keynote. You've got all these SaaS applications, hundreds and hundreds of SaaS applications. They all contain their own data, metadata, process logic, business logic. Your vision, if I understand it correctly, is to be the layer, the trust layer that is able to bring all that together for compliance, governance, privacy, protection, recovery, et cetera, in one platform. Lay that out in more detail if you could. Absolutely, and this is at the heart of it. Veeam was, we started off 20 years back, it was about backup and recovery. And we reinvented that. I think the first big innovation was instant restore. The ability to get everything back with an RTO of two minutes. We pushed forward, as you said, on SaaS applications, Microsoft 365. Now when I look ahead, I talked about the existing AI stack. You have your GPUs, NVIDIA's of the world. You have your data layer, the companies like Databricks and Snowflake. You have the AI models which operate on it, Anthropic, OpenAI. You have your agent orchestration layers, and you have your vertical application layers, which are all AI-driven. And Sam Altman said it actually best. He said the problem and the bottleneck is never going to be compute or intelligence because that is going to become a utility. It is going to be, can you trust the data feeding it? And that is at the heart of our thesis, which is right above the data layer and below the model layer. You need to have a data and AI trust layer. What does it need to do? Today, there are multiple different companies who create individual products. Some for data security, some for AI security, some for governance, some for privacy, some for compliance, and some for resilience. The only way this AI trust layer works is if you are able to unify all of these domains on one platform and one data fabric. One platform bringing together data security, governance, compliance, privacy, and resilience together, and that's what we announced today. Claiming this data and AI trust layer, announcing the Veeam Data AI Command Platform, and most importantly, the only way to bring this to life is you need a command graph, you need a visual graph, a knowledge graph, an intelligence graph, which surfaces the insights from all of these individual and discrete domains in one place. Every data element, the relationships around the data element, what model is touching the data element, what human and non-human identities accessing the data element, and how does it all come together? That intelligence graph is what allows me to bring these together. And for me, this is not a vision, this is not something which I expect to see happen in two years, we announced it today. This is product truth, Dave, today, from Veeam, for the first time in this industry. Yeah, Krista and I were talking in our kickoff, Veeam, you typically don't announce products that you can't ship, you typically don't ship products that you can't sell, the knowledge graph that you're talking about, is that organic development, is that combination, how did it come about? The knowledge graph was actually something which was built by Security AI, the company we acquired last year. They spent seven years, I mean, if you look at the industry, there's a lot of graphs, companies claiming graphs, but when you look at a graph, what really matters is what can it do? Why is this, why am I convinced that this is such a technical evolution and revolution? Because when I look at the depth, this can actually visualize data at a discrete granular element level, not at a database, not at an S3 bucket level, at a granular level, nobody else can do that. This is the first one which has breadth, it has 300 plus connectors, which connects to every data system, AI system, identity system, agent system out there, and this is the first knowledge graph in the industry, which unifies multiple domains. You can see the data from a data security and live data standpoint, you can see your data from a resilience and a backup data standpoint, and you can bring together data from security all the way through privacy, compliance, governance, and resilience, and nobody else brings these domains together. And Chris, I know you want to jump in, I have just one follow-up question. So, you're able to see that data, visualize that data, speak to that data, I believe, and human language, and so it's the technical metadata, the operational metadata, all the information around it, and potentially, at some point, the process data as that evolves. Act on the data, process data, and the key is this, Dave, because of the graph, what does it do for us? It's not just saying five domains need to be together, each domain becomes better because it's connected to the same data fabric. The fact that I know every bit of the data at a granular level and the relationships of data across identity, AI, you know, systems, I can have a better resilience posture and an agentic and automated resilience posture. It makes my resilience domain better. The fact that I can have precision resilience makes my data security domain better. So it makes every individual domain better, and by bringing it together, it allows what every company is searching for. How can I trust the data feeding my AI, and should something go wrong, how can I recover with precision? Only those five seconds which went wrong, only that one agent action which went wrong, not restore 24 hours of work, which means people lose a lot of work across the company, it's very disruptive, precision resilience. That's the beauty of the Data AI Command Platform. So, Anand, you've referenced identity a couple times, and actually, it was kind of showcased in the keynote this morning, which is perhaps a little bit surprising, coming from Veeam, a company that traditionally is data backup and very grounded in that data piece of the equation. So can you talk a little bit to that, because we're seeing this as well, it's very important to marry identity and access controls with data backup and the context around data sensitivity. I'd love to get your perspective on that. Absolutely, I mean, at some point, data identity is very linked to each other. If you don't understand identity at a data element level, and if you don't understand the controls, the policies, the entitlements of that data element, and the relationships of all of these things together, then you can't have the right data security posture, and you can't have the best resilience posture possible. That's what we do. The Data Command Graph brings all of these relationships to life across these five domains, which gets us to the best, every company, to the best data security posture, and then an autonomous, agentic resilience platform, which makes sure that you have precision resilience. Yes, absolutely, and I love that you talked about the resilience posture, because that's so critical today. And that's a foundation, right, Krista? This is what we have stood for for 20 years. We protect more data than anybody else. That gives us a right to actually go down this path. Absolutely, absolutely, and I really liked it on, in your keynote, how you did a callback to some of the core capabilities that Veeam has innovated, like instant recovery, for example. So can you talk to, when you have this kind of security posture, this resilience posture, and the visibility, can you talk to how you're making that actionable for customers by also kind of leaning on these core capabilities of Veeam as well? Simple examples, you know, some of which I showed in the keynote. In a simple, live, natural conversation, I can understand what my, and I showed Microsoft 365, what my data estate is, how many users do not have the right degrees of protection, how much data has confidential PII information being exposed. Now, I'm not just, and that's the intelligence layer, but at the same time, conversationally, I can auto-enable policies to be applied to those documents. I can make sure that I have the right backup strategy, the right data retention policies to be changed to make sure that your RTO window shrinks to as little a time as possible. So not only am I able to act for each domain, I'm able to do it conversationally, using the agents we have built on top of this data AI command platform. You know, I want to ask you about Director Cain Cross. It was a great get. First of all, how'd you get him? The fact that he spent a considerable amount of time here, super busy individual, where does that relationship go back to? Absolutely, so Director Cain Cross, he's the National White House Cybersecurity Director, and we have been working with Director Cain Cross in his impetus on behalf of the White House to shape the national cybersecurity strategy. So this has been a relationship which has been existing, and one of the things I always hear from the director is the importance of public-private partnerships, because the government can set the cybersecurity posture, but they need every single company in the private sector to adopt it and to be ready with it. So this was a great opportunity and when I requested him, he was immediately agreeable because he wants to make sure that he shares this message broadly across the industry, and so that's where he was here, that's why he was here. One of the things he said, Dave, I love, is he says, you know, recovery is not just an IT back-office function or resilience, it is actually a national security imperative, and that's how important the work we are doing is. Yeah, and I would comment, I mean, those of you who follow us on my breaking analysis series and on the Cube pod, you know, I don't always agree with the current administration, but I will say this, they are open to hear and listen to CEO, I talk to CEOs all over the world and they say, in the country especially, hey, this administration wants to learn, they listen, and then they decide. He said, basically, recovering resilience is a core first principle, you asked him about that, and then the other thing I want to get your thoughts on is he said deterrence is a tricky concept, and this was really nuanced. He said trying to make the consequences severe so that humans, you know, their response is going to be according to that severe consequence, so rather than just be totally defensive, actually have consequences for those actions. That's a new posture, it's not finger-wagging like we've heard in previous administrations, it's that public-private partnership. You know, what they say, actually, they use the word, the White House uses the word, it's a mindset shift, that's how they characterize it, which is, don't just play defense, you have to play defense, but don't just play defense, be on the offense. Make sure that the cyber criminals feel the consequences of everything they do on one side, and on the other side, make recovery so seamless and so quick that make the entire effort they put in to doing these things useless. So when you can't hurt us, then what you do doesn't matter. So it's three different things rolled into one. Defense, don't forget defense, be on the offense, and make recovery so seamless, what they do shouldn't even matter. Yeah, so that's interesting, right? It's a completely different posture than I think we've seen from the previous. By the way, this whole thing is what Veeam has always stood for, right? Which is, instant recovery, what did it do? It made recovery seamless, it got RTO down to minutes, and our goal was to get to RTO of zero and RPO of zero. So this is exactly what Veeam has been standing for for the last 20 years. How does AI affect that challenge of getting RTO to zero and RPO as close to zero as possible? It's a whole new game, how do you think about that and how do you architect for that? For companies who still exist in only a pure resilience world and data protection world, I don't think they can survive in the agentic world going forward. That is the thesis behind which we went and said, we need to have proactive intelligence of data with what we are doing on data security. Proactive intelligence at a very deep level. On live data, not just backup data, because that allows us to change our recovery postures based on what we see, usage patterns, identity systems, relationships. Based on what we see every second, we can change our resilience posture immediately, autonomously, automatically. So the only companies who can survive in the world right now are companies who are able to connect all of these domains, historically has been separate, in one data fabric, one platform, that is the only way to get to the right recovery postures in an agentic era. I want to ask you about the markets, how you see the attitudes, sort of the overreaction in my view, towards SAS companies and specifically what it means to Veeam. I mean, we're seeing the reality that you can't just plug an LLM into a vectorized database and get interesting business value out of it. So there needs to be a blending, if you will, of the deterministic systems and the probabilistic systems. And that's what we're seeing now. You're seeing it from the big hyperscalers, you're seeing it from the SAS companies. And so your job is to protect that future. So what are your thoughts on sort of the reaction to the markets in SAS? You guys sell software. What are you telling investors? What's your message? Yeah, I mean, the market message, what has it been since February? That the terminal value of software is zero. Now, what I'll tell you is there is a degree of truth to the fact that the software companies have to change the way they build software and what they stand for. There's many things which they don't need to do anymore because the agents are directly going to reach the system of record and surface insights in a way which we have never seen before. So there's a degree of truth to it. But it's overreaction. As you will see, I mean, you're already seeing many of the SAS companies who deliver meaningful outcomes and are able to explain how they thrive in an agentic world actually come back to a pretty good place. That's one piece of it. The other piece of it for Veeam, we are excited because we feel that Veeam is a company which is going to, it's not just going to be a tailwind for us from a market standpoint, we are going to be that layer which allows every company to be successful in their AI transformation. So we feel we are a critical enabler to the AI era and the agentic era. So I'm actually very excited on what we stand for, our relevance, and as we enter the public markets in due course, what it means for us. Well, let's talk about that. You're here in the capital of New York City, the capital of the capital markets. I know you have, you guys are very efficient. You have investors coming in, you have industry analysts like ourselves, you've got press here. You had given us a stat off camera, like you said, 75 billion was raised this year in public markets, last year, 2025? 2025 raised, I think, 75 billion in capital, yeah. And then between SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropo, each of them will probably raise more money than that. Now, I want to get your take on this because there's a theory that, oh, all the capital's going to dry up, they're going to suck it all up. I've talked to my friends at the New York Stock Exchange, they said, no, no, there's a lot of capital on the sidelines. Your thoughts on that, your thoughts on the timing of an IPO, how do you decide when's the right time? No, so a couple of things. One is, as you said, just between the three of them, you're going to see north of 200 billion in capital raised if they go public this year. But our conversations with the big investors tell us there's a lot more liquidity floating around for the right companies than just that. So I'm not worried about liquidity, that's what our bankers tell us, that's what we hear from investors. So we're just watching. I mean, the good thing is, as we said, Dave, we breached two billion in ARR, we are extremely profitable, we are growing very fast, we don't need money for liquidity. You know, we don't need to go IPO for raising cash. So we are watching where the market is going, and we're going to wait for one or two of these big companies to enter the public markets. We're going to see, you know, what's the market reaction to it, and then we'll make a call. But the key thing is this, I have been running Veeam like a public company for the last three years. The governance we put in place, the execution cadence we have in place, it's like a metronome. We deliver every quarter like the public markets expect. So for me, I don't have to do anything, I don't need the money, but being public is a good, natural next milestone, which will make a difference, you know, for a lot of our longstanding employees. So you're ready to go. If you wanted to go, you could go. We are ready to go, and we will go at the right time, yeah. And the advantage of being a public company is what? Is it the brand? Is it, you could use your stock for acquisition, capital? It is a bunch of that. You know, you have the aperture of how bold you can get on acquisition increases, that's one. The second is, you know, it does make a difference to credibility, because, you know, the bulk of the market coverage is for publicly listed companies. That's who get 80, 90% of the airtime, you know, in the space. So the ability to be a part of that makes a difference. The ability to contribute to the national conversation makes a difference. So there's a few advantages. Well, we've been covering Veeam since 2006. Happy 20th anniversary. Thank you. I remember when I first heard the name, I'm like, wait, is that a VMware product? And it was just absolutely brilliant, but we have watched the ascendancy and the transition, and frankly, the latest one, I think is the most impressive under your leadership. So congratulations on that. Dave, it's been a great partnership with all of you, because I remember I joined Veeam, came to my first VeeamON, had no idea what to expect, and I was told the minute you finish your keynote, you're to go and have a chat at theCUBE. So you've been a partner from day one for me. I'm sincerely appreciative. And as far as Veeam goes, I mean, when I joined, we were a data protection company. We evolved to be a data resilience company in the cybersecurity era, and now we are a data and AI trust company. And the key thing is, we are increasing our intensity on everything we've always done, data resilience all the way through data security, but now we stand for something which is remarkable, powering every company's AI transformation safely, at scale, confidently. So we are super excited. Well, it's a great message, and thank you for sharing with our audience. We really appreciate you being a part of our editorial at the New York Stock Exchange. You come on my program every year at RSA and in our CEO series, and thank you for spending some time with us today. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Krista. Always a pleasure. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Krista Case. We're here at VeeamON 2026, New York City, right back, right after this short break.
