Veeam buys AWS EC2 instance backup and recovery biz

Veeam has announced the acquisition of N2WS, an IaaS startup, whose board includes Veeam co-founder and President Ratmir Timashev, for $42.5mn cash.

It said N2WS was the main provider of cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which makes it the main public cloud backup and DR IaaS supplier, since AWS has 44.2 per cent of the IaaS market.

The main N2WS product is its Cloud Protection Manager (CPM), launched in November 2013, and it can recover EC2 instances with a single click, using native Amazon snapshots. Flagship customers include Coca-Cola, Southwest, Cisco, Dyson, Time, Oracle and Harvard University – not a bad list at all.

The firm was founded in 2012 by CTO Uri Wolloch and VP for business development Ohad Kritz. CEO Jason Judge is based at the US HQ in West Palm Beach, Florida. The R&D centre is in Haifa, Israel, and there is a UK office in Edinburgh – somewhat unexpected locations.

It has had two funding rounds, in January 2017 and then a few months later in May 2017. The first was non-equity assistance from the Microsoft Accelerator in Tel Aviv, possibly of around $2m, while the second was led by global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners with a contributing second investor – the cash amount was kept secret both times.

We guesstimate the second round may have been in the $10m - $20m area.

Jason Judge became CEO at the May funding round time, replacing Uri Wolloch. Ratmir Timashev joined the board, and the company said it would open a new HQ in West Palm Beach. Andy Langsam also joined N2WS as its COO then; the firm was obviously getting ready for major scaling, and the UK office was announced a few months later, to spearhead an expansion in the EMEA market.

Veeam tells us that N2WS grew revenues by 102 per cent in 2017. Further growth prospects are good; the IaaS market is projected to reach $88bn in 2022 by Gartner^*.

Veeam announced Veeam Availability for AWS in May last year as well, at the time of the second N2WS investment round, and that is delivered through a partnership with N2WS. We wouldn't have been surprised to learn Veeam put money into the second funding round, and, in fact, it did, but won't say how much.

Veeam will have access to N2WS technology and research and development (R&D) to integrate Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data protection for AWS workloads into the Veeam Availability Platform.

Existing Veeam customers will benefit from a soon-to-be-launched package of special offers and incentives for Cloud Protection Manager (CPM) from N2WS.

N2WS will operate as a standalone company, with its existing offices, keeping its brand name and becoming “a Veeam company.” Jason Judge will stay on as N2WS CEO and all teams including sales, marketing, R&D and customer service will stay intact.

The N2WS product will get punted through Veeam's alliances and 53,000+ channel partners. And Spanning's private equity backers will be pretty happy too; Veeam just confirmed the cloud backup area is hot, hot, hot. ®

* Gartner: Forecast Analysis: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2Q17 Update, September 2017