GUEST COLUMN by Zeus Kerravala
Veeam Software Group GmbH used VeeamON 2026 in New York City this week to punctuate its shift from “the backup company” to a data and artificial intelligence trust platform for the agentic era.
With a new architectural layer and an aggressive product roadmap, Chief Executive Anand Eswaran (pictured) and President of Products and Technology Rehan Jalil are betting that the next decade of enterprise infrastructure will be defined less by how quickly you can restore a virtual machine or data set and more by how confidently you can let AI act on your data.
For most of its 20-year history, Veeam has been synonymous with backups and fast recovery, to the point that “instant recovery” became part of the company’s identity. Eswaran reminded the VeeamON audience that Veeam earned its leadership by reducing customers’ RTOs from hours to about two minutes and by building “the broadest workload coverage on the planet across virtual machines, physical, hybrid multicloud and SaaS.” That foundation now protects more than 550,000 customers in more than 150 countries, including 82 of the Fortune 500, and drives more than $2 billion in annual recurring revenue.
In Eswaran’s view, what has changed is not the importance of recovery but the nature of the threats and the actors who access enterprise data. He framed Veeam’s history as three eras: traditional backup and recovery (“assume restore”), cyber resilience (“assume breach”), and now the agentic era of AI (“assume autonomy”), in which nonhuman identities operate at a scale and speed that existing tools were never designed to govern.
