A Cleveland startup with roots in Windows management is taking its past successes and applying them to virtual environments.

Veeam was founded in March 2006 by former executives of Aelita Software, which developed Windows systems management software and was acquired in 2004 by Quest Software.

Since leaving Aelita and Quest behind, Veeam President and CEO Ratmir Timashev -- along with CTO Andrei Baronov and R&D Director Alexey Vasilyev -- founded Veeam and quickly got noticed by the end-user community for the company's FastSCP freeware application, which has been downloaded by more than 12,000 to date. Now the company is looking to make a name in virtual machine management with freeware and commercial applications.

"Enterprise systems management is where our roots are. And we see virtualization as a very disruptive technology for the next five to 10 years. It is obvious this is an area with a lot of room for innovation," Timashev says.

The company next week at VMworld plans to announce two commercial products to round out its portfolio. Veeam Monitor is software designed to manage the performance of virtual machines and provide tools for capacity planning, trending and alerting. Veeam Backup combines backup and replication features in one product, and is designed for virtual environments, Timashev says.

Currently the company offers FastSCP 2.0 for VMware, which Timashev describes as a freeware file management product that helps customers move virtual machines and copy instances from one server to another. FastSCP was originally released in October 2006 and, says Timashev, "became the de facto standard for ESX file management." Veeam Reporter, released in January 2006, provides detailed reports on VMware virtual infrastructure and ESX Server. Veeam Configurator, announced in July, offers customers a Windows GUI with which to configure VMware servers.

Veeam faces competition from fellow start-ups such as Virtugo Software and Vizioncore, as well as migration vendors such as PlateSpin. Timashev says in the future, Veeam will expand its support for other virtual platforms when it hears from customers who require more than VMware management products.

"We have always listened to our customers challenges and pains and we will follow that philosophy going forward," he says.

Veeam's Monitor and Backup products are scheduled to be available by the end of October, and pricing will be released at that time.