Veritas stressing its channel benefits

Veritas is on a mission to make it clear to the channel what it can deliver and how it has taken steps to improve partner relationships.

The vendor finds itself in a strong position because of the importance of data management and has been looking to ensure that its partners get the chance to exploit the growing demand for help with storing information and moving it around multiple clouds.

Jamie Farrelly, VP EMEA channels at Veritas, said that there was an ongoing need to inform the channel of the options that it could bring to the table.

"There are four things we talk about: data protection, accelerating and moving data within the cloud, storage and the TCO around that and regulation. If we had a magic wand and could let everyone understand that then I think customers would be in a better place and I think partners would be making more money than they can already," he said.

"Veritas is on a journey and we need to accelerate the visibility of how many customer problems we can solve with our partners so that we can become trusted advisors and work in the new world as well as the trusted world of data protection," he added.

Farrelly said that the vendor had wanted to be more transparent so that partners could quickly identify the benefits that the vendor could offer them: "No longer is there any question mark on what that value is".

Part of that transparency is also around the partnerships that Veritas has formed and making sure that resellers understand what options there are in the wider ecosystem.

"Where these things work there is a win-win because we get a bigger footprint and so does the alliance partner and their investment into their ecosystem finally has teeth and they have rebate programmes around it and they are supporting it publicly," he added "There is a massive step change for the channel to take advantage of when it comes to those technology partnerships because it makes them more sticky because they become the aggregation point for two organisations that will never go to market directly."

There does seem to have been a positive reaction from the channel and some independent metrics have charted improvements in the reaction of resellers to the vendor.

"In the last nine months I feel the traction has completely changed," he said referring to its movement from 'straggler' to 'grower' in the Canalys channel satisfaction matrix.

"That's quite a big leap and the reason it has happened is down to partners and my team being out there telling the story," he added.