What is our primary use case?
It's generally used by colleges, universities, and healthcare. I support a very, very small amount of healthcare. I support state and local government - such as towns, counties, and police departments. It's used in the public sector.
How has it helped my organization?
It's streamlined the backup and recovery for my customers in the sense that it has an easy management console that's easy to set up any type of instant recovery.
It also has helped them as it plugs into just about any cloud. They can not only have backup and recovery but have a disaster recovery plan as well. It really just takes the heavy burden of backup and recovery disaster recovery off of customers and streamlines it.
What is most valuable?
I like that it's agent-less. That's very important to customers.
The biggest positive aspect is the fact that Veeam is relatively hardware-agnostic in regards to what you target Veeam on. This makes it, in the public sector space, very affordable for customers to get into and to have a really good backup and recovery solution. They can choose what type of target they're going to couple the Veeam software with and they can ensure it will be within their budget.
The initial setup is simple.
I find the product very scalable.
The stability is good.
Technical support is great.
What needs improvement?
The licensing models, from a reseller's perspective, could be better. Veeam has changed its licensing models. It'd be nice to have some sort of cheat sheet as we are getting tripped up on the new licensing models.
Although to Veeam, it probably seems easy for them to understand the licensing models, as a reseller of many different products, we're finding ourselves getting tripped up on just the licensing models.
Any type of cheat sheet to help partners understand the licensing a little bit better, so we can have a quick reference guide when we're on the phone talking to customers would help us a lot.
To someone like myself who covers VMware, Veeam, Dell, HP, and a wide set of products, anything to make my life easier to kind of solve the problem for the customer and close the deal and not have any unanswered questions, which are usually around how it's licensed and how it's priced, would help us sell more of their product.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been dealing with the solution for at least five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's very stable. From a post-sales perspective, I have not had any customers complain about Veeam or anything being unstable about it. I do come across customers every once in a while that just don't like Veeam. I do not know why. It's usually someone within the organization that's not on the call. I just had a school district in Colorado. They said his director does not like Veeam. I couldn't get any real answers as to why, however, everyone has opinions, and it's not related to stability. I'm very confident in selling Veeam.
That said, I do come across customers that have had bad experiences. However, I can't elaborate on that, unfortunately.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's extremely scalable. It's very flexible. I feel very confident about the scalability. There are no questions about that. You add more licensing, you can add more drives to whatever appliance that you have on-site. It's very, very scalable.
A lot of my customers, more and more customers, have Veeam. What I anticipate seeing is that a lot of people are going to need to expand their Veeam licensing and renew their support on the Veeam licensing. That's where I see growth. Almost definitely, every account that I come across has some level of backup and recovery in place.
How are customer service and support?
I've found the technical support to be excellent. The folks that I work with that support our partners are great.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I would say the majority of the customers are using Veeam or Barracuda. In some cases, customers use Unitrends. However, a lot of them, my customers, are using Veeam.
Barracuda's pricing is through the roof. They have not stayed competitive. Customers really frown upon their pricing immediately.
Unitrends does not have the mind share of many customers. Many have not heard of Unitrends. In the public sector, traditionally school systems and so forth, use the Barracuda. A lot of that is in the public sector. Unitrends is a little bit harder to sell as it's a new product. Also, from a partner perspective, they are much harder to navigate as far as getting pricing and the account manager wants to talk to you. It seems like they get caught up in the procedures of selling it. Whereas, Veeam streamlines that whole process for us and really makes it easy to sell.
How was the initial setup?
The implementation is very straightforward.
Deployment is circumstantial depending upon how large the customer's environment is. My company has a services team that can put together a statement of work to help with any type of setup, installation, or migration to services. In some cases in larger accounts, we'll bring in our services person to go on-site and help them install, implement, and set up Veeam. That's all part of the solution portfolio that we support.
You only need one person for deployment and maintenance, even in the larger accounts. Based on everything that I support, installing Veeam is probably one of the easiest deployments that are out there. We only deal with under 1,000 users. Some of the colleges get a little bit big. However, I'm not in the enterprise space. I'm in the public sector. We do have some large cities from time to time. Most of the deployments that I do are usually under 1,000 and are very small counties and so forth.
What about the implementation team?
We can help our clients set up the solution.
The Veeam engineers have actually helped a customer install it on-site as well. There was a gentleman from the Veeam engineering team that called him on his cell phone and they had it installed within five minutes. It was phenomenal support.
What was our ROI?
The return on investment is the protection of the client's data center. It's hard to tie a dollar amount to that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Veeam's pricing typically is extremely competitive. Rarely do we see it higher than the competitors'. With their new licensing model that they have put into place, they have really made it extremely affordable for a lot of my small towns who have to go to the town hall or police departments and request money. You've got the chief basically running the IT and running the police department. They look at things differently as they're not IT people necessarily that we're working with. Therefore, when they see pricing on technologies, it's even harder for them to justify the spend. However, Veeam has done a really good job at really staying competitive. I would say that they're definitely the strongest from a pricing perspective.
In terms of extra costs above licensing, if someone decides to use the cloud, that would be considered an operational cost. Then, of course, whoever the IT staff is, there's got to be some level of maintenance and provisioning and configuring and so forth of users. There's the head count too that goes with supporting Veeam.
What other advice do I have?
I'm a reseller.
We tend to deal with the most recent version of the product.
Clients should understand how to configure it and how to set it up. That's kind of where my expertise would come in is configuring the hardware that the Veeam is going to reside on.
I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten based on the overall support, the professionalism. From my perspective, Veeam does everything. They're my number one product. I tell my guys over at Veeam that support me, they are the best. They're always there to support me and get back to me. It's a great company.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.