Pioneers in data storage and data resilience recently showcased technology breakthroughs at the latest edition of Technology Live! in London. The lineup featured leading enterprise backup and recovery software vendor Veeam, data protection vendor Keepit, and enterprise data storage vendors Solidigm and Hammerspace, who unveiled cutting-edge innovations and performance enhancements, and glimpses into their future strategies. Presenters shared next-level insights on AI-optimised data storage, strategies for improved data sovereignty practices, and guidance on mitigating the complexity of data protection in SaaS and intelligent environments.
This premier event regularly brings together leading-edge vendors and renowned influencers, including technology journalists, bloggers and analysts, for a day dedicated to deep-dive demonstrations and engaging discussions on industry trends. Hot topics debated at this edition included data protection vs. the evolving threat landscape, the industry impact of AI, storage technology advancements and the challenges impacting its trajectory, as well as data governance.
Veeam launches Data Platform v13 for next-gen intelligent security and ransomware protection
Data resilience heavyweight, Veeam, empowers businesses to achieve a state of ‘robust resilience’ across cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS, and Kubernetes environments, with complete control over data and the ability to seamlessly recover after any disruption.
Veeam’s Field CTO, Cloud Strategy Michael Cade and Vice President of Product Strategy Rick Vanover exclusively revealed the company’s latest product innovations, including a brand new data protection solution designed for a world shaped by relentless ransomware. The team also introduced Veeam’s next major phase: a unified data and AI command platform that brings together protection, security, governance, and AI trust into one intelligent experience. The new Veeam Data Platform v13 covers over 60 new and improved capabilities, significantly enhancing the company's capabilities in data protection, security, and resilience, while also introducing AI-driven support. The updates are designed to redefine the standard for cyber resilience, with improved availability, an expanded suite of anti-malware features, and an expansive hypervisor integration model, plus forensic tools with AI-powered capabilities for pre- and post-attack scenarios.
The session also featured a series of short demos, alongside practical insights into data sovereignty, the shifting landscape of the hypervisor market, and real-world customer experiences.
Keepit: redefining business continuity in a cloud-first world
Keepit is known for the unique architecture of its next-level SaaS data protection platform, purpose-built for the cloud. By securing data in a vendor-independent cloud, the company safeguards essential business applications while ensuring data availability, boosting cyber resilience, and future-proofing data protection.
At Technology Live!, Keepit’s leadership delivered a stark message. UK businesses are rapidly increasing their use of SaaS applications, but their backup and recovery strategies aren’t keeping up - leaving critical data exposed when cloud providers fail.
UK & Ireland VP Dan Middleton opened the session with an update on Keepit’s accelerating UK growth and the company’s vendor-independent approach to cloud backup. He pointed to a widening protection gap, where organisations are onboarding numerous SaaS tools without adequate backup in place, creating significant continuity and compliance risks.
Highlighting mounting data governance pressures across UK industries, Dan explained that many organisations are struggling to align policies with UK and EU legislation and increasingly complex data sovereignty rules.
CISO Kim Larsen underscored that data location is becoming a defining factor for effective data governance, and dissected the hybrid threat landscape, delving into shadow IT and supply chain vulnerabilities. While CTO Jakob Østergaard and Product Director Mark Groves discussed the next steps in Keepit’s product roadmap. Notably, introducing the ability to back up and recover data from many more SaaS applications, from eight at the start of 2025 to hundreds in three years, made possible with new Domain-Specific Language (DSL). This year has already seen rollout to seven further applications: Jira, Bamboo, Okta, Confluence, DocuSign, Miro, and Slack, with rapid expansion to follow.
Solidigm explores a world of AI-optimised data storage and the value of its new AI Central Lab
Solid-state storage firm Solidigm used Technology Live! to confirm its expanding EMEA ambitions and spotlight new developments in storage designed for AI workloads, as rising GPU demand makes I/O performance a critical bottleneck for enterprises.
New Chief Revenue Officer Paul Palonsky highlighted recent momentum in EMEA pointing to multiple recent customer wins and a major 2025 milestone: Solidigm supplied the full production volume of its high-capacity 122TB SSDs for key deployments strengthening its position in leading the enterprise storage solutions.
Director of Leadership Narrative and Evangelist Scott Shadley briefed attendees on how rapidly growing AI models are placing new strain on storage, where not warning that slow performing storage can leave costly GPUs sitting idle. The Solidigm team reiterated the company’s strategy to build storage optimised for AI at scale and showcased its AI Central Lab - a secure test facility housing the world’s densest storage stack for AI workloads, enabling organisations to run real-world training and inference tests.
The executives also highlighted several of Solidigm’s recent technical developments, including its Direct to Chip (DTC) Cold-Plate-Cooled SSD for enabling fanless server environments, as it continues to focus on improving total cost of ownership, cooling efficiency and performance for next-generation AI infrastructure.
Hammerspace unveils the first architecture that meets AI and HPC workload demands at global scale
Hammerspace is known for its data platform to accelerate AI data readiness as well as HPC and research computing initiatives. Its global namespace unifies data and enriches metadata across sites, clouds and existing storage, unifying data silos into a single global namespace and orchestrates automated data delivery to GPUs and AI models, allowing teams to rapidly source the right data, while maintaining data control and governance.
Molly Presley, SVP of Global Marketing and Seamus Matthews VP Sales and Business Development EMEA, announced major advancements across the Hammerspace high-performance data platform, including expanded ecosystem collaboration with NVIDIA and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Solutions for the NVIDIA AI Data Platform helps enterprises use existing data more efficiently for AI workloads: improving performance and scalability without requiring new storage silos or major infrastructure changes. Hammerspace’s Tier 0 architecture provides the lowest latency, highest throughput shared storage performance in the data centre and the cloud. It enables OCI Bare Metal NVMe to operate as a high-performance storage tier for AI, suitable for both small projects and large-scale environments.
The team also introduced its latest software release featuring improvements to performance, security, and interoperability, alongside new IO500 benchmark results that showcase breakthrough parallel file system performance using standard NFS instead of a proprietary client on the server. The IO500 10-Node Production demonstrates that standards-based Linux and NFS are capable of fulfilling the demanding performance standards of HPC and AI workloads - a notable development for organisations looking to build high-performance environments without proprietary systems.
Demonstrating the data platform’s real-world impact, the team announced that Vanderbilt University’s Advanced Computing Centre for Research and Education (ACCRE) has chosen Hammerspace to modernise its research data infrastructure. The 10-petabyte deployment creates a single global namespace across server-local Tier 0 storage, commodity Tier 1 systems, and archival LStore, and is expected to reduce ACCRE’s average storage costs by 48% while improving access and flexibility for researchers running AI, HPC, and simulation workloads.
About Technology Live!
Established in 2015, Technology Live! is the number one European, vendor-independent event where suppliers and IT influencers get together. The largest event of its kind, Technology Live! is a one-day deep-dive where up to four vendors present their technologies to the region’s leading journalists, bloggers, analysts, and other independent influencers. In 2026, Technology Live! will take place in Paris on 19th March, in Munich on 18th June, and London on 12th November.
