Member Spotlight: Veeam and Jordan Jacobs

Get to know the member companies and individuals who make up the i2Coalition. Every month, i2Coalition Communications Manager Dakota Graves sits down with the leaders of Internet infrastructure companies to discuss their businesses, the Internet infrastructure industry, policy work, and more.

Dakota Graves: Thank you for joining me today, Jordan. You are the Senior Director of Global Cloud Solutions for Veeam. Veeam has recently joined the i2Coalition but you worked with us previously.

Jordan Jacobs: Absolutely. As I have transitioned organizations, my belief in what the i2Coalition stands for has remained the same.

Dakota: Let’s talk about your history with the i2Coalition. You were involved with the i2Coalition from the beginning, but as you said with a different company.

Jordan: My previous organization, SingleHop, was a founding member. When our co-founder stepped down from the board, I joined the board. I have been here ever since.

Dakota: You knew our co-founders, Christian Dawson and David Snead, from their work during SOPA/PIPA, the Save The Internet Coalition?

Jordan: Correct. I was at the original kickoff party at HostingCon 2012.

Dakota: You obviously saw the importance of the work the i2Coalition does. Thank you for supporting our work in advocating for the Internet, it’s technologies, companies, and the economic benefits that it provides.

Jordan: I’m proud to. I don’t believe legislators are trying to make “bad decisions.” There is an intent for a positive outcome from every bill and idea. No one disagrees with that positive intent. However, the outcomes of those positive intents often have ripple effects. We founding members saw this as an organization that could contribute to those discussions, minimizing unintended ripple effects.

Dakota: Absolutely. We did that with the Save The Internet Coalition. Since 2012, we’ve been working together to do that as the i2Coalition. Let’s change gears and discuss Veeam.

Jordan: Veaam is an incredible company. We are just over 10 years old. We’ll finish this year at over a billion dollars. At the core, Veeam is a data Availability company. Data is more important that it has ever been before, and Veeam is at the forefront of guaranteeing Hyper-Availability for the modern enterprise. My team runs the VCSP program which is the program that allows our service providers to protect their own infrastructure and offer managed Availability services to end customers of any size. They can also offer cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions powered by our products.

Veeam has 300,000 customers that all have our software installed. That gives service providers an untapped market to dip into. They can offer solutions that tie directly into products that are already installed and running.

Dakota: 300,000 unique companies providing your software to their customers is huge.

Jordan: Absolutely. We add 4,000 new customers every month. We’re protecting over 17 million VMs. It’s massive.

Dakota: What has made Veaam so successful compared to its competitors?

Jordan: SingleHop is a huge Veeam partner, so I’ve worked with the Veeam team as both a partner and an employee. In my opinion, Veeam’s success boils down to two things.

First is the software. I’ve been in love with it for many years. It is easy to use. It works perfectly. We make sure that we launch solutions versus “me too” features.

Secondly, and arguably more important, is how passionate our customers are about Veeam. Our NPS score is 73. That is three and a half times the industry average for an NPS score. That is shockingly high for any business, especially a software business. It shows how well we support our customers once they’ve purchased the software. It also shows how many resources our solutions teams have to assist customers in deciding to purchase. It reinforces the first point — how good our software is.

It shows how much we value our partnerships with service providers and resellers. We are a 100% channel-driven organization. We don’t take a single dollar of revenue directly.

I go to a variety of trade shows. I have a term I call the “Veeam high five.” People will come to the booth and say “We’re Veeam customers, we love it.” They came over to say that and give us a high five. They are that passionate about the product.

Dakota: How do you cultivate and maintain those partnerships?

Jordan: We have massive teams to support these partnerships. We have our reseller partner organization that works with our resellers. Then there is our cloud partner organization that works with our cloud service providers. And last but not least, we have our alliance partner organization who works with the largest alliance partners. This is public clouds like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all the way to hardware vendors like NetApp, HPE, Dell, and IBM. We work very closely with all three groups to make sure our partners of all sizes have everything integrated, working, and that our sales teams can be successful together.

Dakota: Veeam’s commitment to quality, from product to support, seems to be paying off!

Jordan: We’ve got 3,400 employees now and growing very rapidly.

Dakota: Where are you primarily based?

Jordan: We are global. Our worldwide headquarters is in Switzerland. We have offices in 40 countries and employees around the world. We are truly global and have local language support for many of them.

Dakota: Since you’re a global company, that means you have global policy concerns. What issues are important to Veeam?

Jordan: Across all of our customer groups, encryption is one of the biggest concerns. It is important to our customers that the encryption capabilities we provide stay protected. They don’t want governments to force them, the service providers, to keep the encryption keys. They want to make sure that they control the keys.

Another major concern intermediary liability. If someone went on a website and bought a counterfeit NFL jersey, we would not hold FedEx, UPS, or the Postal Service liable for delivering that jersey. That is where we’ll be if we’re not careful. This protection is a cornerstone that has made the Internet so successful and it is constantly under attack. While this wouldn’t impact Veeam directly, we are hand in hand with our cloud service partners. What’s disruptive to their businesses would be disruptive to ours.

Dakota: Let’s change gears and talk about our most recent FIy-In event in Washington DC. You attended the i2Coalition 2018 congressional Fly-In in early June. How did you find it this year?

Jordan: The conversations were interesting and enlightening. It was great to hear from the different agency and legislative representatives on the challenges they face. I loved the award ceremony that we have annually. Hearing Congressmen Doyle and Poe speak about how important the work that we do was great. Overall, I thought it was a fabulous event. It was also a great chance to meet and network with some of my peers.

Dakota: Jordan, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I’d also like to thank you for your help and attendance at our annual Fly-In.

Jordan: Of course.