Veeam's today aquisition - licence price concerns

[alesovodvojce]

Insight Partners said Thursday it will acquire data management company Veeam in a deal valued at $5 billion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai ... cc1fa43d8b

Congratulations. Also a question.
As we see with our vendors quite often, as soon as somebody buys them, the acquierer wants its money back asap and use pricing for that.
My concern is how can we prepare ourselves against this move, specifically: how much in advance are we allowed to buy licences?
To at least fixate the price as much as possible. Or any other tips?

[audax]

Yes, today is a bad day for all Veeam customers.
Becoming a US company, prices will go up and quality will go down, undoubtedly.

[guitarfish]

I'm trying to think of times in the past where awesome, small independent companies got bought by large venture capital firms and it worked out great for the customers, the products got better, and everyone was super happy with the results. Thinking...still thinking...

[Gostev]

Think VMware?

[Mildur]

Hopefully, this will not get Veeam V10 delayed more days or weeks ;D

[Trelor]

Everyone is concerned about pricing what about Gostev and the weekly emails I hope you are still going to be there.

[alesovodvojce]

Adding Gostev's future to the post-aquisition price concerns

[Mildur]

Everyone is concerned about pricing what about Gostev and the weekly emails I hope you are still going to be there.

True

[JPMS]

I read Bill Largent's email and wondered who writes this guff?! He may be excited to announce the acquisition but I hate to break it to him, I for one, am truly depressed.

I'm feeling like the kiss of death. We were six months into using DUO 2FA and they get bought by Cisco. A once excellent networking company, who's only excellence now seems to be gouging its customers.

All the utilities that we have used that have been bought by Solarwinds who just quadruple the price and maintenance fees.

Now six months into Veeam and this. If Veeam looks anything like it does now in five years time I will be truly amazed.

[jmmarton]

how much in advance are we allowed to buy licences?

You can purchase up to five years of prepaid maintenance/support.

Joe

[nitramd]

Adding concern about the rest of the fine folks who work in Europe!

[robg]

"license price concerns"

Have you guys stopped the ridiculous and greedy policy yet of punishing customers for not keeping up with maintenance and support?

I've purchased Veeam in 2014 for some clients, and I've NEVER needed your support, it seems I made the right decision and saved a lot of money. Backup software support is supposed to be incident based. Like I call the AC repairman if my AC breaks, I don't need to pay him otherwise.

If I were to decide to renew it to get the latest version, am I going to be forced/screwed to buy the previous years' worth of support? Or should I start over with new licenses?

I know you inherited this robbery from VMware (I don't pay recurring costs for that either), it seriously offends me in a big way. How about you decide to re-activate your cable TV service after not having any for 5 years, and they tell you that you owe them for all that TV you never watched. Give me a break.

[robg]

And one more thing, just because CPUs CAN run more VMs these days, doesn't mean that everybody DOES. See: small businesses that need new servers but still only have about a dozen VMs. Keep raising your prices drastically and you will be creating your own competition.

[Gostev]

Technically yes, this rule remains in place just as before.

In practice however, there's an on-going renewal promotion that allows to waive the reinstatement fee.

Using your own comparison, AC has been serviced a few times per year for all these years regardless of missing maintenance and support, which is why it never broke in the first place. Because almost all customers keep installing product updates, even if they are not eligible for them. This is exactly what allows them to go without support, so in most cases it's fair to require the purchase of missing years of support.

For small businesses with just a few VMs and low density, we provide per-VM licensing, which is way more cost effective for this case than per-CPU pricing (and it's only the latter that will continue to see further increases due to average VM density increasing).

Having said that, let's stay on the original topic and avoid turning this thread into all things licensing and looks like OP's question has already been answered.

[robg]

Gostev, I think you took the AC comparison a little too far, software is not a mechanical device, if it's left untouched, it will never break. Veeam is excellent in this regard, I haven't needed any updates or maintenance and am still on version 8 in one environment.

I still resent the practice of having to pay for back years of support that was never used on principle, at least there is a way around it. Maybe you should ditch the policy altogether because it's manipulative.

About the per VM licensing. let's say if I want to add a couple VMs at some point.. Does THAT require that a support contract be maintained, i.e. another gotcha for ongoing costs?

[Gostev]

Normally not, as with per-VM licensing aka Veeam Universal License (VUL) we allow to exceed license usage by 10 instances (or by 10% of licensed amount, whichever value is greater).

[jmstco]

Gostev, I think you took the AC comparison a little too far, software is not a mechanical device, if it's left untouched, it will never break. Veeam is excellent in this regard, I haven't needed any updates or maintenance and am still on version 8 in one environment.

I still resent the practice of having to pay for back years of support that was never used on principle, at least there is a way around it. Maybe you should ditch the policy altogether because it's manipulative.

About the per VM licensing. let's say if I want to add a couple VMs at some point.. Does THAT require that a support contract be maintained, i.e. another gotcha for ongoing costs?

You must never do Windows updates either. I love Veeam (no, I don’t work for them), but all software has bugs, period, so updating Veeam is just smart. Unless you have a static environment where you NEVER make changes (usually found managed by fly-by-night IT or “My sister’s brother knows computers...”), you will eventually run into a scenario that you could’ve easily avoided by paying a small maintenance fee.

[robg]

Jmstco, your comments are nothing but ignorant and offensive stereotypes. Static environments aren't all run by amateur "my sister's brother knows computers". I have over 20 years managing these environments with NO incidents of downtime due to an unexpected software OR hardware failure. And I do run windows updates frequently, they never break the version of Veeam I use, or anything in the OS itself except in extremely rare cases.

What changes in your environment are so drastic that you have to keep updating your backup software? Just because software has bugs, doesn't mean that every bug affects you. If disaster recovery restore tests are successful, then it's a stable version of Veeam to keep for the long term. It's actually much more foolish to be bleeding edge with all of the major data loss problems that ESXi 6.5 has had recently.

You are just pompous and snooty with the attitude of "there's only one way to do things, and if you dare do it differently you must be stupid/amateur" - and this common attitude in IT is pure trash. You think that paying maintenance for software is "just smart" - actually I beg to differ. My environments are simple, and I've never needed it.

[Gostev]

While I'm not saying you're necessarily the same Rob, but virtually ALL customers that I talked to who also "never needed a maintenance contract" (and were bragging how they never ever needed to contact Veeam support), were still happily installing all the 9.x updates that we released over the past years, despite technically speaking not being eligible for them as per our EULA. And I always find this mismatch of saying one thing and doing another amusing

And yes, I do think it's smart to keep your software up to date, especially when it comes to backup software.

It's also not necessarily a stupid approach to not "touch" completely static environments, but in modern realities such environments should be extremely offline I ran into customers even from quite "serious" organizations, who would be running an antique version of Veeam Backup & Replication against a custom build of ESXi 3.0 that VMware created specifically for them to support their special guest OS, and that was in times when the current ESXi version was already 6.x... but these are very special environments, one of a kind.

[robg]

Well, I did install the latest 8.x version as high as I could go, I just never went to 9. I very much disagree that these environments need to be "extremely offline". There is nothing custom here, so there is no risk of running into an obscure bug. The only VMs that I have are an exchange server, a file server, AD's, and the production applications. All of these things run just fine with windows updates, and they are very much "online."

The fear and concern is overrated, and in EVERY horror story of ransomware/malware that I have seen, it's always due to someone's negligence (like getting yourself infected on an account with domain admin rights) - NOT a lack of updates to Veeam.

These environments last only so long though, about 10 years due to Microsoft deprecating Windows server and updates. So I'll usually upgrade/re-do everything when it has to be done, and then it goes another 10 years without support contracts.

[Gostev]

Well, in that case all I can say is - good luck! Because I'm convinced everyone running unpatched software in an environment that is not "extremely offline" really needs it

[robg]

It isn't unpatched, dude, didn't I say that I run all of the windows updates?

Or is there a malware that can do something to Veeam 8.x? Really? And it's smart enough to jump subnets from the office and somehow magically find the datacenter and break into the backup server without admin credentials?

Is this more or less likely than a massive asteroid crashing into our city? There's being security conscious, and there's just fear mongering.

[Gostev]

Well, I guess I have an unfair advantage of dealing with a customer base of almost 400K companies, and that is not even counting free product users. But we do get to hear about actual cyber attacks in support pretty much weekly for the past few years. Interestingly, many customers don't only come when they need help to salvage their only backup copy that got encrypted, but also to tell us when their backup strategy worked well and Veeam saved their data. And many invest in full research to understand where they failed, which they share with us. So, we learn a lot on those cases.

Basically, you'd be surprised, but your description above that was supposed to be a joke is actually pretty accurate, including subnet jumping. What seems to happen most commonly is once malware is let inside of the network perimeter by a careless user, it rings back "home" through one of the open ports, and lets the hacker into the environment through that connection made from the inside. And after that, it just a matter of time before they get a hold of admin credentials particularly through vulnerabilities in an unpatched OS or software, which they specifically scan the network for.

So from what we know, chances are definitely much higher than those of an asteroid. And frankly, I'm a bit puzzled by your denialism in times when successful ransomware attack stories are published pretty much daily, and they happen all around us. Even today: these guys were actually replacing windows in my apartment exactly 1 year ago, and now they had to file for bankruptcy and let all 170 employees go, following ransomware attack they could not recover from (or pay ransom). So, it reminds me a bit of that famous story of HIV/AIDS denialism by one of the magazines a while ago, which eventually ceased to exist - because their last editor died to AIDS.

[Mgamerz]

Backups are never a big deal until you need them and they don't exist or do not work

In which case you might not need backups again, at least at that company

[robg]

Denialism you say, well allow me to retort. Every ransomware and malware attack is due to somebody's negligence.

For example, weak and easily brute force-able passwords and an outside exposure with RDP.

A dumbass "admin" who gets malware with a domain admin account. That admin account has the same credentials to automatically unlock a HyperV environment (these are stories from your own digest).

So in this example you cited of a compromised PC being used by a hacker to scan the network. Let's say they find the servers. Oops, they're all patched with windows updates! Good luck exploiting the applications or SQL server, they're patched too, and the passwords are all complex and unguessable.

And then there's the assumption you make that every group of users is the same, that they are all prone to being careless. That's not true either. Some have more controls in place to prevent this, some have more training and experience, some just don't browse the web at all. Some are prohibited from doing so due to policy, or don't out of fear of losing their jobs (remember when people had to come into the office to work, and there wasn't facebook?) The users are a huge variable as to whether or not malware is a big risk in the first place.

As for getting in from the outside with nothing compromised internally, good luck with that.

I do appreciate your position of toting the company line for the advocacy of support contracts for your product, it must be a huge cash cow, and I do appreciate that some people need that safety net to save them from their own foolishness, but not everybody does.

[ober72]

Hi Rob,

To be fair I don't think you can place Anton Gostev in the marketing/sales steroid slogan screeching team ( a la Make Backups Great Again!!!!). If you read his posts they are to the point no BS. You have to admit that there have been huge issues with Windows even if you kept everything up to date. The only thing that I might ever leave untouched is OpenBSD, but in my closet and ... with a cronjob dial up task to get mail etc...

Obviously you are angry about the pricing stuff and that is a fair and good point. However, I know that I don't even trust myself (especially on a Saturday morning after a "fun" night out) even though I have been an admin for many years with a pretty good "lucky?" record. We need protection and insurance from all the many changing and evolving threats that are out there. The defense is always adjusting to the new tactics deployed by the Offense... at least in hockey . Of course companies will seize on this to make money but that is more a problem with the system and not the company. There are other vendors out there too so no one is forcing us to buy veeam. I personally have had a very good experience with veeam. If Veeam changes due to this acquisition then.. as my first wife told me... "everything comes to and end" .

Anyways, just trying to put in a fair argument Hope no offense is taken.

cheers

[robg]

ober72: don't get me wrong, I respect Gostev and enjoy reading his weekly digests. Most of the time I agree with everything he raises.

Making the right IT decisions seems to be becoming a lost art, in a way. I'm talking about limiting the scope of damage or eliminating the risk of malware/ransomware in the first place, like driving defensively.

The Veeam support contract is a type of insurance, a safety net type of service which makes sense, but I don't personally need. The problem I have with it is the company's predatory policy of "punishing" you for not keeping it current by charging an extra percentage when you try to renew. There's no reason that should exist other than greed.