Veeam: Pushing the services opportunity

Veeam has come a long way from its virtualisation roots and so has its channel base. That expansion and the focus for partners were areas that got the attention in this conversation with Greg Bailey, Director Channel and Cloud, Veeam UK and Ireland. 

Q. Relationships with VMware, Microsoft and others have bolstered you channel numbers. How is your channel faring?

“The past eighteen months we’ve announced a number of significant alliance partnerships with best of breed vendors. We’ve had the resale deals with Cisco, HPE and NetApp, and the relationships with Nutanix, IBM, and Pure, to name a few, have given us a deeper technology integration.

“We’ve seen little impact on our ProPartners; they’re well positioned, given good support, and are therefore in a robust position to take advantage of these alliance relationships. We’re now working closely with partners to help them craft solutions for their customers, and we’ve seen several early initiatives being developed in the UK, and also in Germany. There will be more soon too. In some cases this is creating a new go to market solution, but underneath all of them is the intelligent data management that Veeam provides – be it a new way to backup Macs, or a clever way of tackling audits needed for regulation. That’s where the future is, innovating on the original product line to create sector specific solutions that solve customer’s specific pain points.”

Q. What are the opportunities out there that you are flagging for partners?

“We’re sold fully through our channel – there is no direct sales force at Veeam, so all customers that are interested in buying Veeam are an opportunity for our partners – we take nothing off the table. So, a massive multi-year, multi-socket enterprise-scale deal for a bank, or a small 2 socket virtualized server for the web designers down the road, are all there for the taking. We add value educating partners on the product suite, producing the marketing support needed to understand the value the products can bring, and helping with their understanding of the best product and pricing model for a customer, based on their specific needs and IT infrastructure.

“We recognise that customer environments continue to evolve and become more complex, and in support of our partner community we have implemented a Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) program that provides industry-leading professional services capabilities that enable partners to create additional margin opportunities. And, after 40 quarters of double-digit revenue growth, it is clear the opportunity, if you work closely with Veeam, is there for a reseller too.”

Q. Veeam has moved beyond just availability and data protection and now has the data management to offer partners. How has that gone down with the channel?

“Honestly it’s been very well received. Hyper-Availability is the new expectation for data in large organisations today. Not having data available? That’s a no-brainer – it can’t happen. Data must move to a new state of intelligence where it can automatically anticipate need and meet demand.

“Data must securely move across multi-cloud infrastructures. And data must meet the expectations of the mobile, always-on world. And, that last one is a real pressure – expectations from consumers evolve at a rapid rate. Having this new level of data availability brings new insights from the data a business owns, and rapidly increases the productivity and speed needed to encourage innovation and delivery of new digital services and experiences; this is where it improves how we live and work.

“The Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform is a pretty unique product, and if a customer has a shared vision to achieve data management nirvana – which is what we’re pitching with our vision of Intelligent Data Management, we’re the best vendor they could hope to work with. We’ve been explaining the vision with our partners since our Partner Summit in February, and it has landed really well. Partners now use it as a roadmap to build up a technology proposition that enables them to go deeper into a business and create new re-sale and margin opportunities.”

Q. As we start to gear up for Q4 what can the channel expect from Veeam? What will be the main messages to partners?

“Last year we delivered some big product updates and the alliance relationships, this year has been about delivering on that. For example, we’ve just released version 2.0 of our Microsoft Office 365 backup product – this is really cool, because we now support Sharepoint and OneDrive, as well at Outlook. It’s a great product that fills a really big void in the market. It also helps our Microsoft MSP resale community that are looking to move their business to an annuity model.

“Next year is about partner engagement and executing more on the plans. I sound like a broken record, but we are a 100% channel centric company and we’re wholly committed to our partner’s success. I said at the start of the year we wanted to do more business, with fewer partners. That is still the case – understanding our partners and what they need to be successful is paying dividends. Partners are transitioning and transforming to real business outcomes and moving away from transactional based selling, so we’re aiding them in the sale process, and showing where the value add can be. We want to invest in partners who are committed to Veeam as our success is intrinsically linked to theirs, and with intelligent data management our core focus, we now have a great vision to deliver on.”