At Technology Live Munich, Veeam outlined a shift from backup toward “Data and AI Trust,” anchored by Veeam Data Platform v13.1, a deepened HPE alliance, and new research showing most EMEA organizations are deprioritizing data sovereignty to move faster on AI.
At Technology Live event in Munich on June 18, 2026, Veeam Software set out how it intends to extend its backup and cyber-resilience business into what the company calls the “agentic era,” a phase in which autonomous AI agents, not only human users, access and act on enterprise data at machine speed. The session was opened by Armin Müller, Regional Vice President for Central EMEA, with Michael Cade, Senior Director of Product Strategy, and Edwin Weijdema, Field CTO EMEA, presenting live demonstrations and an outlook on the company’s roadmap, including Veeam Data Platform v13.1.
Veeam framed the shift around three converging trends: a reversal of data gravity as AI infrastructure expands faster than the controls needed to govern it; zero-trust frameworks designed for human users rather than AI agents; and data security as the primary line of defense as agentic systems take on tasks previously performed by people. The company describes this as moving beyond backup and cyber resilience toward “Data and AI Trust,” organized around a DataAI Command Platform and an underlying DataAI Command Graph for unified visibility across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments.
Version 13.1 of Veeam Data Platform extends workload support to additional virtualization and hyperconverged platforms, including HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, Citrix XenServer, Sangfor HCI, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, alongside SaaS connectors for Microsoft Dynamics, GitHub, and Okta. The update introduces a universal licensing model in which licenses follow the workload rather than the platform, with a 30-day grace period to support migrations such as moving from VMware to Proxmox. Other additions include forest-level Active Directory recovery, which Veeam said takes approximately five minutes per domain, expanded support for AWS, Azure, Microsoft 365, and NAS environments, and built-in, FIPS-compliant post-quantum cryptography that the company says requires no re-architecture of existing deployments. Veeam also pointed to AI-assisted features such as a capacity advisor and proactive support tools, alongside Model Context Protocol server integrations intended to let AI agents query Veeam’s systems directly.
The Munich event coincided with a separate announcement at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, where Veeam and Hewlett Packard Enterprise expanded their alliance around private cloud and AI infrastructure. The companies introduced validated designs for HPE Private Cloud AI, a turnkey AI platform co-engineered with NVIDIA, combining Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Kasten for operational continuity of virtualized and Kubernetes-based workloads, alongside safer data-ingestion controls for AI pipelines. HPE Services will serve as a pilot partner for Veeam’s new Data and AI Trust Maturity Model, which benchmarks readiness across four pillars: Understood, Secured, Resilient, and Unleashed. “AI will transform the enterprise, but only if leaders can trust the data that powers it,” said John Jester, Chief Revenue Officer at Veeam.
The announcements were accompanied by research commissioned by Veeam and conducted by Censuswide, surveying 1,000 enterprise IT, data, and security decision-makers across the UK, Germany, France, and the Middle East and Africa between April 21 and 27, 2026. The results point to a gap between stated priorities and organizational behavior: while 99 percent of respondents agreed data sovereignty is critical, 72.5 percent said their organizations are actively deprioritizing it in favor of faster AI deployment. Forty percent named data used for AI or analytics as their biggest operational blind spot.
Regional patterns varied. In Germany, 82 percent of leaders said accelerating AI development takes priority over data controls, the highest share surveyed. In the UK, 58 percent cited breach prevention as the main sovereignty driver, yet 45 percent acknowledged AI and analytics data was their largest blind spot. French respondents were less likely to call sovereignty critical, citing intellectual-property protection as a stronger motivator. Organizations in the Middle East and Africa reported the most mature sovereignty execution, with 60 percent fully operationalized, but also the highest reliance on third-party vendors, at 38 percent, which the report links to supply-chain visibility gaps.
Compliance reviews and market expansion remain the leading triggers for sovereignty action, ahead of proactive governance planning. Confidence in established regulation such as the GDPR stayed high, at 90 percent, but was markedly lower for newer frameworks including the EU AI Act. Beyond AI workflows, respondents identified visibility gaps in public cloud environments, cross-border data flows, and shadow IT deployed outside formal governance.
“If you can’t see where data is going, who can access it, and what AI systems are doing with it, you don’t have control,” said Andre Troskie, EMEA Field CISO at Veeam, arguing that without that control, AI adoption can become a board-level liability rather than an advantage. Tim Pfaelzer, General Manager and SVP for EMEA at Veeam, said organizations face a trade-off between moving quickly with AI and maintaining the governance structures regulators increasingly expect, and called for greater visibility as a precondition for scaling AI responsibly.
Taken together, the Munich presentation and the accompanying research outline how Veeam is positioning itself, technically and commercially, at the intersection of data protection and AI governance, a market the company is betting will shape enterprise IT spending in the DACH region and beyond.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de