A Blog by Richard May
Now that the dust has settled from VeeamON Miami and the jet lag has subsided I thought it would be a good time to write a little bit about the event and our experience.
First off, I have to say that the event overall was fantastic, it was well-polished, and the location was well-positioned. The attention to detail from the Veeam Team was second to none with VeeamON pool floaties, a state-of-the-art Dog Robot and an amazing after-party, all primed for social media.
The presentations were highly informative, even for me and I consider myself a Veeam veteran. Looking back, three presentations from the event stood out for me, the first was jointly presented by Timothy Hudson and Ivan Kochemosov, where they gave an overview of the Veeam Service Provider Console. Between them, they demonstrated its comprehensive capabilities and shared some unique tech tips that I’ll be utilising in the future.
The second presentation was ‘365 at scale’ presented by Falko Banaszak and Veeam Vanguard Jim Jones, together they gave an insightful presentation into Architecting Veeam at scale.
Finally, and most surprisingly for me, was the ‘Tactical Empathy’ session, which was presented by ex-FBI negotiator Chris Voss. I must admit that I’m usually very sceptical of skill coaches, but it was a very funny session that got me thinking. In fact, I’m still thinking about it and might even have to purchase his book. By the way, for anyone reading this that attended the session, I just have to say… “you’re right!”
The Journey to an Innovation Award
At this stage, I’d like to exclusively thank Mike Tonks, our Account Manager at Veeam for believing in virtualDCS and CloudCover. As always, he went above and beyond in his role and suggested that we enter the Veeam Innovation Awards.
After the application was submitted, we all waited, not daring to believe that CloudCover could really rise to the occasion and despite the odds, here we are, the first European winners of a Veeam Innovation Award!
The virtualDCS team knew of our win a few weeks before the public and it was incredibly hard not to shout it from the rooftops! It was officially announced on Veeam’s blog on the 16th of May. This is where the uphill battle began.
The Best in Show battle
Despite the huge accolade of a Veeam Innovation Award, there’s no denying that the virtualDCS team is ambitious. We had now set our eyes on Best in Show, but we were up against some stiff competition.
Best in Show is a peer-voted award, across all Veeam Innovation Award winners in both the customer and partner category. For context, 2022’s winner was IBM Cloud, and this year we were up against Asda, 11:11 Systems, Alpha Bank, and more.
I’m proud to say that the virtualDCS team truly got behind the cause and with the support from our partners, customers, and contacts we were left flabbergasted as we sat on the front row and Jason Buffington announced… “Tonight, 2023 VeeamON Best In Show is… virtualDCS!”
You can view a recap of the moment here:
What’s next for virtualDCS?
Receiving the Veeam Innovation Award was a recognition of both the hard work and the strong relationship between virtualDCS and the UK Veeam team… but winning Best in Show acknowledges that our partners, contacts, and customers believe in CloudCover just as much as we do.
We wanted to send a huge thank you to everyone that voted for virtualDCS to win this prestigious award and to reassure you that we will be using this accolade as a stepping stone towards further innovation.
