Unitrends and Veeam: Why Veeam Is Talking About Unitrends Now

Recently a few buyers made us aware that Veeam has some web pages asking people to switch from Unitrends to Veeam.  That’s fair enough; I actually think that more backup vendors should openly publish material about their perspective on the competitive landscape.

It made for interesting reading…but then again, I enjoy fiction.  It ranges from misleading to just plain silly.  I put it aside as just one more example of Veeam’s exaggerated marketing  – but after a few days of reflection, I read it again.  As I read it, I kept wondering what would a buyer who didn’t know any better think – not just about Unitrends but about Veeam as well.  So I decided to write a series of blog posts concerning Veeam’s web pages recommending their products versus Unitrends  – breaking it down and also filling in some pretty important gaps from the perspective of an IT professional looking for a backup and continuity solution.

In this first blog post, I thought I’d attempt to give my opinions as to why Veeam chose to “advertise” Unitrends now.  It’s actually pretty simple.  Veeam is a company that focuses on selling software to backup only two virtualization platforms: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.  Unitrends is a company that focuses on offering integrated solutions for continuity and backup that include hardware backup appliances, software, and cloud offerings. Veeam and Unitrends didn’t really come across each other that often in the past.  However, as Unitrends has grown, that has changed – we’re competing increasingly against each other.

But beyond the fact that we’re competing against Veeam more and winning, why “advertise” Unitrends now?  I think that there are three reasons:

  • In April, we released Unitrends Free – free continuity and backup for 1TB of user data for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V with infinite retention, infinite sockets, and infinite virtual machines  At VMworld 2015 in San Francisco in August, we extended that protection to free (unlicensed) VMware vSphere and Windows.
  • With the Unitrends Free product, we introduced a radically different user interface that we code-named Satori.  VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V administrators using Satori tell us that it is vastly superior to Veeam’s user interface.  Then in August we began beta of the full Satori user interface for all of our software and hardware.  Veeam quite rightly is proud of the fact that it is a leader in virtualization backup – and Veeam was one of the first backup companies to focus on virtualization rather than the legacy technique most backup vendors used which was to treat virtualization as just another “asset” to protect.  At Unitrends, we’ve spent the last two years creating a user experience that was focused on virtualization protection – but also seamlessly, elegantly, and simply supported over 200 versions of servers, storage, operating systems, hypervisors, and applications.  We’ve had thousands of partners and  IT professionals as well as some of the top user experience talent in the industry working with us – and we’re deeply grateful to everyone involved.  This is the reason Veeam is warning people about our “flashy new user interface.”  All of a sudden, the term “modern data protection” that Veeam has used as a club against other backup vendors begins to sound – well – antiquated.  For a comparison of Veeam’s user interface and Unitrends Satori user experience, see below.
  • Probably worst of all from Veeam’s perspective (even worse than the industry and analyst accolades we’ve been receiving) was that last month we made a decision to begin offering our software and our cloud at much lower pricing.  Veeam has a history of raising prices every year – we took a very different approach – our pricing for superior functionality is dramatically lower than Veeam.  We felt we could take this approach because we have many more potential buyers than Veeam since we protect so many more environments.  For our new pricing, see below (full description at this Unitrends pricing  link.)

You can find more on Veeam pricing here.  And you can find Veeam’s perspective on Unitrends that inspired this series here.

In my next post, I’ll provide an overview of this series.  I hope that this series of blog posts will be informative.  I think that it’s important for buyers to be able to understand both the technical differences between the two companies as well as the philosophical and cultural differences.  As always, would love to hear what you think.

 

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