Veritas reveals channel’s role in growth strategy

Veritas’ EMEA channel lead says the backup vendor is adopting a “start-up mentality” as it looks to grab market share in both the enterprise and midmarket.

“Veritas is a big brand but we’re trying to drive a start-up mentality, because essentially, we’re as start-up as well in the need to grow our market,” Veritas’ EMEA channel director, Jamie Farrelly tells Microscope.

The firm was spun off by Symantec in 2014 and sold into the Carlyle private equity group for $7.4bn in 2016. Since then it has undertaken a company restructure that included the appointment of a new CEO, Greg Hughes, in January.

The last six months have seen the company redefine its channel coverage model and overhaul its partner programme as part of a “mission to re-engage with our existing partners and recruit new route-to-market partners to help accelerate that move to cloud,” says Farrelly.

The former Symantec channel exec says he joined the firm in February after seeing “a business that was in growth again after a heavy transition”.

“Our goal is to drive as much as possible through our partner channel,” he says. “Over 87 percent of our business goes through partners, this quarter it was in the 90s. Our sales leaders understand that it’s the partner that drives the multi-vendor solution to our customers.”

Multi-sector strategy

Veritas is adopting a two-pronged approach to growing the business. The firm is “doubling down” on platinum partners such as Softcat, Bytes, Computacenter and SCC to target the enterprise. It wants them to increase their services revenue by adding on sales of Veritas Resilience Platform (VRP) and its SaaS backup solution to its core NetBackup offerings.

“We’re focused through the new partner programme on ensuring we have a focused set of platinum and gold partners that are committed through accreditations and sales to driving a focused attack on the enterprise and midmarket,” says Farrelly.

In the midmarket – a space where Farrelly admits Veritas needs more penetration – the firm is taking a territory management approach to scale the business instead of managing individual accounts as it does enterprise.

“We’ve seen a massive difference because of those changes. Veritas is back in the midmarket where the likes of Veeam have dominated for the last few years. That’s our goal, to be multi-sector and relevant. Our growth figures have dramatically increased from what they were,” he maintains.

New partner programme

Veritas is “driving so much innovation”, says Farrelly, but it needs “to be better at communicating how that syncs with the partners’ strategy, and how they can make money from it.”

To that end, Veritas overhauled its partner programme in April, massively reducing the time involved for training and certification, and introducing a more sales-focused approach.

“It’s much more focused on understanding the business benefits to the customer, as well as the financial benefits to the partner, and we’ve got a lot less technical,” says Farrelly.

The exec also notes Veritas now offers more clearly differentiated rewards: “We’ve increased the platinum rewards so it’s more enticing to move up the stack – the feedback from partners had been there was little difference between gold and platinum so why should they invest? That’s very different,” he says, adding that Veritas has also change its deal registration system, to provide more value to partners.