LEADERSHIP TEAM
Anand Eswaran is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Veeam. Anand’s strategic vision, inclusive leadership and execution focus has created a track record of building and leading high growth successful global businesses.
Prior to joining Veeam, Anand led RingCentral to accelerating growth and innovation, as their President and Chief Operating Officer (COO). Prior to RingCentral, Anand was responsible for Microsoft’s Enterprise Commercial and Public Sector business globally. Earlier in his tenure at Microsoft, he led Microsoft Services, Industry & Digital, Customer Care, and Customer Success — a global team of 24,000 professionals.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Anand was the Executive Vice President of the $5.4B Global Services business at SAP, leading 17,000 business process and technology professionals to accelerate customer and partner value creation through SAP’s enterprise applications. He has held multiple other leadership roles including Vice President of Global Software Services at HP, Vice President of Global Professional Services at Vignette (now OpenText), and Senior Manager at Braun Consulting (now Fair Isaac).
Anand is a founding member of the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) and served on the executive advisory board for 12 years. He holds a master’s degree in computer science and engineering from University of Missouri-Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from University of Mumbai, India. He is married and has two children.
Matthew Bishop is Veeam’s Chief Operating Officer. He leads Veeam’s digital transformation to automate its customer journey and create operational scale. Matthew manages all Veeam’s operations teams, IT/IS and Security functions, and strategic initiatives.
Matthew was previously the Chief Digital Officer of RingCentral. Matthew was responsible for creating and implementing RingCentral’s overall digital strategy, with a focus on using data and insights to enrich and enhance customer and partner engagements and support RingCentral’s growing operational needs.
Prior to joining RingCentral, Bishop spent over 19 years at Microsoft, most recently as Corporate Vice President of Commercial Strategy and Operations of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business, where he was responsible for rapidly identifying opportunities to grow new business and increase usage and adoption around the world. He has led sales teams across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and received the Microsoft Chairman’s Award from Bill Gates for his sales leadership. He joined RingCentral from Core Scientific, where he served as Chief Administrative Officer after leaving Microsoft.
In 2012, Bishop was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the Queen of England in her Birthday Honours List for his voluntary work in protecting children online.
John Jester is Veeam’s Chief Revenue Officer, and is responsible for the company’s go-to-market growth strategy and helping build upon Veeam’s position as the #1 provider of Modern Data Protection solutions spanning Cloud, Virtual, Physical, Hybrid, SaaS and Kubernetes.
John joins Veeam from a successful tenure at Google Cloud where he helped build the go-to-market organization through his leadership of the Customer Experience organization; in this role, he drove cloud adoption and business value for customers, supporting Google Cloud's growth to over $23B ARR. Prior to Google, John spent 20 years at Microsoft leading sales organizations and reimagining the GTM across the customer lifecycle. Specific roles included Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Customer Success, where he established a new organization to drive adoption of Microsoft's cloud services, Vice President Worldwide Specialist Sales, where he led enterprise sales strategy across the full suite of enterprise cloud services, General Manager UK Enterprise and Partner Group, and General Manager of Global Accounts with responsibility for sales to Microsoft’s top 100 enterprise customers. Throughout his career, John has worked closely with partners and sees them as integral to crafting solutions for customers.
John attended George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in business administration.
As the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Veeam, Dustin Driggs leads Veeam’s global financial function including strategy and reporting as Veeam continues to gain market share and provide best-in-class secure backup and fast, reliable recovery that keeps businesses running.
Driggs is an accomplished finance leader with more than 30 years’ experience in successfully building and managing large multinational businesses. He joined Veeam in February 2022 from Barracuda Networks where he worked for over 16 years, most recently as Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President leading the finance and accounting function. Prior to Barracuda Networks, Driggs held senior leadership roles at Cisco Systems and PwC.
Rick Jackson is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Veeam. An experienced marketing leader who has been at the forefront of technology his whole career, Rick leads Veeam’s global marketing organization, driving brand preference and ongoing growth as the #1 market leader of Modern Data Protection solutions that span Cloud, Virtual, Physical, Hybrid, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Kubernetes environments.
Prior to joining Veeam, Rick spent eight years at Qlik, where he led the global marketing organization and helped transform Qlik into an end-to-end data and analytics SaaS company during his tenure. Before that, he served as CMO of VMware, helping to drive its transformation from virtualization to cloud infrastructure and launching the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) initiative. It was at VMware that Rick was first introduced to Veeam and its industry-leading solutions.
Based in Texas, Rick holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from California State University, Northridge, and is a passionate advocate and public speaker about marketing, leadership and the importance of embracing the “how” as well as the “what” in company culture.
Lucy Hur is the Chief People Officer at Veeam. Lucy is an HR executive and business builder with 30+ years of experience in business and HR leadership positions at several global, high-growth technology, consumer, and consulting organizations. As the former Chief People Officer of Slalom, Lucy was responsible for leading Slalom’s people strategy to scale the global operating model to enable Slalom’s rapid global expansion and nurture a people-centric culture, resulting in many global best places to work accolades. Prior to Slalom, Lucy spent 13 years at Microsoft leading HR for various global businesses: consumer channels, advertising and online, marketing, and the worldwide commercial business. Earlier in her career, Lucy held HR leadership roles with Starbucks and Nokia, was a management consultant at PwC, and started her career at Procter & Gamble after earning a BBA in Marketing from the University of Texas at Austin.
Nate Kurtz is Veeam’s Chief Information Officer. He leads the Corporate Technology (CT) team and is responsible for Veeam’s global business systems and internal technology.
Nate was previously the leader of the Technology Services team at F5 Networks. He spent over 10 years at F5 leading the team through a period of significant growth. He helped transform the overall customer and employee experience at F5 and built a team that operated and scaled with a rapidly growing company.
Prior to joining F5, Nate spent over 11 years at Arthur Andersen and KPMG, where he was part of the global technology and telecommunications practices. He led both the sales and delivery teams with many of their high-tech customers, including Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia and F5 Networks.
Nate started his career in the U.S. Army and was a member of the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Ranger and Airborne schools. Nate is also a graduate of the University of Washington and the Foster School of Business.
As Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Veeam, Gil Vega establishes and executes Veeam’s vision and strategy to ensure its information assets and solutions are adequately protected, while driving strategies to help customers protect their critical data across multiple environments and ensure regulatory compliance.
During his career, Gil has held various cybersecurity leadership posts within the U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and in financial services. With more than 20 years’ experience, Gil is widely respected as an expert in cyber security operations, digital security and technology risk management in highly-regulated environments. Before joining Veeam, Gil was Managing Director & CISO for CME Group, the world’s leading exchange operator. Prior to his career in financial services, Gil was a member of the U.S. Federal Government’s Senior Executive Service and served as the Associate Chief Information Officer & CISO for the U.S. Department of Energy and as CISO for U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement in Washington, DC.
Gil holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Information Systems & Information Assurance, is a graduate of the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville and a proud veteran of the U.S. Army, having participated in combat operations in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
Niraj Tolia is the Chief Technology Officer at Veeam. Most recently, Tolia was the co-founder and CEO at Alcion, until it was acquired by Veeam in September 2024. Previously, he was the co-founder and CEO at Kasten, the leading and award-winning Kubernetes backup company that was acquired by Veeam in 2020. Post-acquisition, he continued as General Manager and President of the Veeam Kasten business unit to accelerate the growth of Veeam’s cloud-native business. With a strong technical background in distributed systems, storage, and data management, Tolia previously held leadership roles, including Senior Director of Engineering at Dell EMC and VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Dr. Tolia received his PhD, MS, and BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Shiva Pillay, Veeam General Manager & Senior Vice President, Americas, is responsible for leading Veeam’s growth and business operations across the region. Shiva has spent more than 15 years in the IT industry, working across various spaces including Data Protection, Security, SaaS, and Automation.
His experience covers several functions, revenue generation, sales, customer retention, professional services, operations, channel, and alliances in both regional and global capacities, having lived in Australia, the US, and Singapore.
Shiva has held senior leadership positions at RSA, EMC, The SCE Group, Prevalent Inc. and SevOne. Most recently, he was the Veeam General Manager & Senior Vice President for APJ, joining Veeam in 2018. During this time, he led inside sales, channels/alliances, pre-sales, cloud service providers with a focus on driving alignment, high growth and optimizing performance and later taking on all responsibility for the region.
His passion for customers and partners is evident in how he approaches business and the way in which he builds and leads teams. Under his leadership, the Veeam APJ team has broadened their share in key markets as it serves to solve modern data management challenges in a rapidly changing ecosystem.
Shiva also currently serves as an advisor for several start-up organizations in the US and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and Psychology from the University of Wollongong. He currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
Jim Tedesco is an industry veteran with more than two decades of sales, operations and leadership experience. He is responsible for customer support offerings for the company’s end user customer base, customer satisfaction and continuing to grow the company’s industry-leading Net Promoter Score.
Jim has held numerous senior leadership positions, most recently as Executive Vice President of Corporate Sales and Business Development for a mobility application development software company where he led the worldwide corporate sales efforts across all market segments. Earlier, he was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales for ScriptLogic, acquired by Quest Software and now Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL), and Senior Vice President Sales for CA (NYSE: CA). He has also held senior management roles, including Vice President North American Sales Operations and Senior Vice President Channel Sales.
As Chief Product Officer, Anton Gostev leads Veeam’s Research and Development (R&D) and Product Management teams.
With 15 years of experience at Veeam, Anton is directly responsible for everything engineering-related at Veeam. He brings trademark dedication and commitment to this role – leading our teams to deliver genuine value for customers while ensuring the future of Veeam and its products are tightly woven into the fabric of our company’s mission and purpose.
Anton has always believed that Product Management should go beyond responsibility for the product itself and touch the entire customer journey. His active position in all matters related to the customer experience has made him a key stakeholder for R&D, Customer Support, Pricing, Packaging and Product Marketing decisions – leading him to become a valuable member of the Veeam Executive Team.
Based in Switzerland, Anton started his career as a Support Engineer at Aelita Software and then became the leader of Veeam’s Product Management organization. As a result of his thought leadership and active participation in various IT Professional industry communities, he is a well-respected face of Veeam R&D for customers and partners.
Beni Sia is the General Manager & Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan for Veeam Software. He is responsible for leading business growth and expansion in the region as Veeam continues to invest and innovate in the Cloud Data Management space.
Beni joined Veeam in July 2020. Prior to his current role, he was Vice President of SEA & Korea (SEAK) and led the regional team by maintaining key partner and customer relationships, as well as extending market penetration to drive dominance in key business segments.
Tapping into his expertise, Beni aims to chart Veeam’s strategic direction for the APJ region to further propel growth and increase customer adoption across markets. With more than two decades of experience leading enterprise technology vendors, Beni has extensive expertise in driving growth, transformation and innovation for customers and partners. Beni was also Vice President, APJ at Service Source, managing the region’s client relationships, process strategy, sales management teams and the region’s P&L. Other previous roles include sales leadership and management positions at Broadcom, Brocade, Juniper Networks, Dimension Data and Cabletron Systems.
When Beni is not transforming client and partner relationships, he enjoys tennis, hiking, snowboarding, reading and traveling.
Tim Pfaelzer is the General Manager & Senior Vice President of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for Veeam. He is responsible for the company’s growth and business operations across the region.
Tim has spent more than 20 years in the IT industry, including holding management roles at Dell along with Adobe, Autodesk and Salesforce. Joining Veeam in 2021, he was most recently Vice President of Enterprise business in EMEA at Veeam.
He has an unwavering commitment to the success of Veeam’s EMEA customers and partners and is passionate about bringing the industry’s broadest set of data protection and ransomware recovery capabilities to organizations so that they can build radical resilience against ransomware and loss of critical data. Tim works with teams across Veeam to ensure that when data disruption happens, customers are not only bouncing back but bouncing forward. Based in Germany, Tim leverages his vast experience in business development, marketing, sales and general management to lead and develop the Veeam EMEA teams.
Brandt Urban
SVP of Worldwide Cloud Sales
As Senior Vice President of Worldwide Cloud Sales, Brandt Urban is responsible for leading specialist sales for Veeam’s cloud product portfolio, including Veeam Data Cloud M365, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, Public Cloud data protection, Veeam Kasten and Veeam Backup for Salesforce. Brandt and his team are also responsible for Veeam’s hyperscaler alliances.
Brandt delivers world-class assistance to Veeam customers along their journey to the cloud and provides data protection and resiliency plans that meet their needs. His passion for working with customers, partners, and building new businesses is evident by his willingness to jump in and help any customer, regardless of size or location.
With nearly 20 years’ experience in the technology sector across a range of GTM roles, Brandt joined Veeam in January 2023. Prior to Veeam, Brandt held leadership roles at Genesys, RingCentral and Microsoft in global executive roles focused on specialist sales and customer success. Brandt spent 11 years at Microsoft and departed as the General Manager of Dynamics, Microsoft’s $5+ billion suite of line-of-business applications.
Brandt currently resides in Redmond, WA with his wife and two children and enjoys traveling (35 countries and counting!), golf and F1 racing. He earned his MBA at the University of Michigan.
A 35-year veteran in the storage industry, Russell joined Veeam in May 2018 as Vice President of Enterprise Strategy, and as of April 2024 is Senior Vice President, Head of Strategy. Russell drives Veeam’s vision for products and services, research and community engagement programs globally.
Previously, Russell held the role of Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, focusing on storage strategies and technologies, with an emphasis on backup/recovery, and was also the lead author of Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup & Recovery Solutions from 2005 to 2018. Prior to joining Gartner, Russell spent over 15 years at IBM in Storage Research and Development as a Software Engineer in mainframe backup/recovery and as a manager of Product Development, Architecture and Strategy teams for distributed systems backup/recovery and storage solutions.