Veeam Ropes In Anand Eswaran As CEO

Veeam Software, known for backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection, today announced that it has appointed Anand Eswaran as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and a member of the company’s Board of Directors. William H Largent (Bill Largent) will step down as CEO to focus on his role as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Veeam, which crossed $1 billion in ARR this year and has over 400,000 customers, is at the heart of the data ecosystem and orchestrates data movement, control and trusted protection in any environment and across Hybrid Cloud. 

Eswaran joins Veeam from a successful tenure at RingCentral where he was President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), overseeing exponential growth and customer expansion. In the company’s most recent financial results under Eswaran’s leadership, it reported ARR of $1.6 billion, a 39% increase year-over-year. 

Bill Largent has been a key pillar of the company over the past 15 years. Under Largent’s leadership, Veeam has enjoyed a record year of profitable growth in 2021, and was recognized as a Leader for the fifth time by Gartner in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Solutions – the second year as the highest ability to execute, and with its market-leading growth, secured the #2 position worldwide in terms of market share. 

“The data management landscape is evolving at an exponential pace.  Veeam is the unequivocal market leader, and is the most trusted partner to help customers securely navigate the complexity of protecting their data to keep their business running; to bolster this position we continue to challenge the status quo, innovate, and ensure we are anticipating customer needs,” said Bill Largent, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Veeam.  “I am excited to welcome Anand as Veeam’s new CEO. Anand brings extensive experience in developing new business models, executing on market expansion and driving growth with an inclusive purpose-led and people-first culture. 

To have someone with Anand’s experience onboard will lead us into a new era of success, as we further accelerate into the cloud and evaluate the opportunity for Veeam to be a publicly-traded company in the future.”

“Veeam is a unique company that is growing significantly faster than the market. I am delighted to be joining such a talented team at an exciting time in its journey,” commented Anand Eswaran, CEO at Veeam.  “Data is exploding and has become one of the most important assets for all organizations.  As such, data management, security and protection are pivotal to the way organizations operate today, and failure to have a robust strategy can be catastrophic. Veeam has a unique opportunity to break away as we sit in the middle of the data ecosystem, with the most robust ransomware protection and ability to protect data wherever it may reside.”

Eswaran’s strategic vision, inclusive leadership and track record in driving growth is well recognized, and he has the perfect background to lead Veeam to achieve the next $1B in ARR and beyond.  At RingCentral, he led Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Services, Customer Care, Operations, IT, and Human Resources.  Prior to RingCentral, Eswaran was responsible for Microsoft’s Enterprise Commercial and Public Sector business globally; earlier in his tenure at Microsoft, he led Microsoft Services, Industry Solutions, Digital, Customer Care, and Customer Success — a global team of 24,000 professionals.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Eswaran was the Executive Vice President of the $5.4B Global Services business at SAP, leading 17,000 business process and technology professionals to accelerate customer and partner value creation through SAP’s enterprise applications.  He has held multiple other leadership roles include Vice President of Global Software Services at HP, Vice President of Global Professional Services at Vignette (now OpenText), and Senior Manager at Braun Consulting (now Fair Isaac).