How Anand Eswaran is safeguarding the digital world at the helm of Veeam

Anand Eswaran fell in love with technology back in the ‘80s.

Stepping into the role of CEO at Veeam — the world’s leading data resilience company — Eswaran has carried forward the company’s legacy of success and led it through three years of double-digit revenue growth. He believes that his early fascination with machines and data set him up for success in the fast-paced world of software.

Much to the consternation of his parents, Eswaran had a habit of taking apart the family’s appliances. “From radios to fans, I was fascinated by how mechanical objects worked,” he says of his childhood in Mumbai, India.

No machine was safe until, at age 15, he received his first computer. “There was a whopping 40 megabytes on the hard drive,” he recalls, laughing. “That’s what really got me hooked on technology.”

He played the early PC games Prince of Persia and Gorillas. “You could create and reimagine whole worlds,” he explains. “From then on, computers were an obsession.”

Eswaran took his love of computers and earned a master’s in computer science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, laying the foundations for his impressive career.

He worked his way up through some of the world’s largest technology companies, beginning in consulting and then landing an in-house role in 2000 at Vignette (now Open Text), where he spent several years.

Eswaran moved to business intelligence at computer giant HP in 2007, building its SaaS business from scratch. He then spent the 2010s leading global teams at SAP and Microsoft to connect data across the enterprise and move services to the cloud.

In 2020, he landed his first C-suite role as COO of RingCentral, an AI-driven cloud business communications provider in San Francisco.

“The thing that links it all together is data,” Eswaran reflects. “From my first job, working in databases and data warehousing, data has been a big part of my life.”

And as Eswaran became increasingly established in the tech world, so did Veeam.

“The opportunity was impossible to ignore”

Veeam, founded in 2006, protects and secures that which is most valuable from SMBs to the world’s largest enterprises: their data. Whether that data is stored on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid of the two, Veeam’s platform promotes data resilience through secure backups, instant recovery, and a top-notch user experience.

Veeam’s founders, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, have a longstanding and successful history with Insight Partners, dating back to 2002 when Managing Director Michael Triplett was part of the team that invested in their first venture, Aelita Software Corporation. This early collaboration laid the foundations for a strong partnership, including Insight’s minority investment in Veeam in 2013. Timashev and Baronov had the vision back in 2006 to build a world-class data protection platform, which ultimately has gone on to support more than 67% of the Global 2000 and over 550,000 organizations.

“Ratmir and Andrei built an extraordinary company with a vision that reshaped the data protection industry, and Insight Partners has been proud to support that journey from the early days of Aelita Software to Veeam’s rise as the global leader in data resilience,” said Triplett.

Insight went on to acquire Veeam in 2020 and, within six months, helped facilitate the purchase of Kasten, the market leader for Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery, marking an important step in Veeam’s evolution to lead the market in modern workload protection.

In 2021, Insight reached out to Eswaran to shepherd this new phase for the company. “I was COO at RingCentral at the time, and I wasn’t looking for a change, but after a few conversations, I saw the scale of the opportunity,” he says. “Veeam’s product was the best in the market, and I knew I could help bring a renewed focus on go-to-market, engineering, and execution.”

“This category is constantly reinventing itself, and this was a chance to reshape a whole industry — I loved the cultural significance of that.”

“I felt Insight would be a true partner on the journey, and the opportunity was impossible to ignore.”

Scale up your career: See all open roles at Veeam.

The investor POV

“Veeam is an incredible business, and it needed a certain kind of leader for this next chapter.”

“We found Anand after a very long search,” says Managing Director Philine Huizing, who sits on Veeam’s board. Finding the right leader to take the reins is never easy, but it’s a crucial step in many companies’ journey. As the business grew, the founders made the thoughtful decision to pass the torch to a new CEO — continuing their vision to drive innovation and long-term success.

Eswaran stood out because of his “strengths in defining and articulating a vision, his compassion, and his humility,” says Huizing.

“He brings team members to board meetings to showcase their work, not take the credit. He’s great at bringing transparency and accountability to big goals and targets, but he also cares a lot about the people who work for him — their points of view, their careers, their ambitions for the business — and that is a powerful thing.”

Eswaran spent his first two months at Veeam “listening, traveling, meeting customers and partners, and the team,” he says. “This is a company that was already doing well. I didn’t need to make big changes — I needed to understand where my priorities lay.”

Under his stewardship, Veeam’s sales strategy evolved into a cohesive, multi-region play where everything from marketing to renewals ran harmoniously. He has created an M&A strategy that deepened Veeam’s ability to offer resilience, security, and intelligence to its customers.

“In the world we live in today, retention is the new growth, and we have followed that path to success,” says Eswaran.

Insight has been a critical partner to Veeam, from helping the company build market share in the U.S. to winning more enterprise customers and moving into the federal space for the first time.

“Our thesis has always been this: This is a fantastic company — it is highly efficient, built on a foundation of best-in-class technology and operates in a market whose tailwinds have compounded in the last several years and continue to grow. Let’s build now, harden the systems and processes, hone the go-to-market strategy, continue the culture of innovation to head where the puck is moving, and help it become one of the most successful private software companies,” says Huizing.

Veeam has maintained a strong relationship with Insight, including Triplett, who remains on the board. “Under Anand’s leadership, Veeam has continued to scale, innovate, and define the future of backup and data security. While the company evolves, the core mission remains the same — ensuring businesses worldwide stay resilient in an increasingly complex digital landscape.”

“He has a real passion for this category and this company,” Eswaran says of Triplett’s involvement with Veeam. “When we spoke, I expected him to be like other private equity people I’ve met — focused solely on profitability. But instead, he just wanted to talk about growth.”

Over the years, Veeam has worked with Insight Onsite — a dedicated team of over 130 professionals fueling success through every stage of growth. Onsite has worked with Veeam on several initiatives to drive growth and enable a multi-product strategy.

“Anand and his team have continued to innovate their sales approach, building out best-in-class sales and customer reporting capabilities and establishing sales training incorporating AI. The team takes a creative and analytical approach to each operational challenge, and we’re thrilled to continue to partner with them,” says Dave Cates, managing director at Insight.

“Insight has been phenomenal at connecting us with the startup ecosystem that is innovating in our space.” 

“Anand and team have a strong point of view on M&A roadmap and strategy, but we are very plugged into this space, so we help with sourcing and executing deals,” Huizing adds.

Decades of runway and growth ahead

Over the past two decades, Veeam has found success by surfing the waves of technological progress — without wiping out.

The first being in the early days of perpetual software when Veeam disrupted the data protection industry by focusing on protecting virtual machines (VMs). As infrastructure needs evolved, Veeam anticipated the next wave: expanding from virtual to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Eswaran explains that “the transition from just protecting VMs to literally protecting every environment” was a key factor in Veeam’s ability to scale, ultimately helping the company break through the billion-dollar mark and firmly establish its reputation.

In 2023, responding to the changing threat landscape, the needs of Veeam’s customers, and Insight’s market analysis, Eswaran’s focus was on the burgeoning SaaS backup space.

In September 2023, Veeam led a $21M Series A funding round for Alcion, an AI-assisted SaaS backup platform, which it has subsequently acquired. This deal and the acquisition of CT4 have cemented Veeam’s position as one of the world’s leaders in the fast-growing SaaS market for data resiliency and ransomware protection delivered as a service.

With Insight’s backing, in April 2024, Veeam acquired cyber-extortion incident response player Coveware. This acquisition expanded Veeam’s offerings to create end-to-end ransomware protection and recovery capabilities.

This has positioned Veeam to provide flexible, cloud-native data protection that aligns with modern hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. It ensures that Veeam continues to ‘look around corners’ and catch successive innovation waves in the industry.

“I can confidently see decades of runway and growth ahead,” says Eswaran.

“It just works”

As of November 2024, Veeam is close to $2B in ARR while achieving 30% profitability. “A year and a half ago, we broke through as the number one, ahead of Dell, IBM, and Varonis,” says Eswaran*. “We have been chipping away for 18 years, and here we are, working in partnership with giants like Microsoft and AWS.”

Eswaran has big ambitions for the future, but financial goals are of secondary importance, he explains.

“Numbers are a consequence of meeting our real goal: to safeguard the digital world with exceptional resilience.”

“That’s the ultimate ambition. The fusion of resilience and intelligence for our customers. We believe everything we achieve will come as a consequence of getting that part right. You have to keep looking around corners and catching successive waves.”

The best part of the job is seeing how customers relate to Veeam as a brand, Eswaran says. “We have one of the best communities in the world. Go to Reddit forums, and you see our customers using the phrase: ‘It just works.’ I’ve never seen so much trust and engagement with a software brand before Veeam.”

At the company’s customer events, many attendees turn up wearing Veeam green: “I love the evangelism,” he says. “The brand has a life of its own.”

Eswaran started his career focused on data, and he is still in the data business today. “My whole career set me up for Veeam,” he explains. “Data is the modern currency and what we do, protecting data, and building the resilience of the digital world.”

*Note: The statement referenced above reflects comments made by the CEO during recent conversations.