Veeam leaning into consumption-based offerings

Veeam Software says it is taking steps to transition more of its business from a perpetual-based licensing model to one based on users’ consumption.

Speaking to Microscope at the company’s conference, VeeamON, James Mundle, VP of worldwide channels, said the company will begin the process in North America and will then look to roll out the changes across its other regions.

He said that Veeam wanted customers to buy products in a way that best suits their economic model. “You want to do it on a rental or consumption basis? Yes. You want to work with an MSP? Yes. You want to buy subscription licenses? Yes. You want to buy perpetual licenses? Yes. It’s whatever makes the most sense for the customer,” he said.

Carey Stanton, Veeam’s VP of global alliances, agreed, noting that “More people are doing it as-a-service and so we’re giving them that flexibility. And new products we introduce like Office 365 [backup] is 100 percent subscription licence.”

Mundle also revealed that the vendor will be offering a new online provisioning tool for volume rental agreements and licence key management, called Pulse.

“One of the big challenges that a lot of the VCSPs [Veeam Cloud Service Providers] have had is licence key management – it’s cumbersome, and kind of clunky, and difficult. So, they can do it all online now, plus, they can then report their monthly consumption,” he said.

“We need to build these things so that it becomes a way of doing business that makes their life easier to enable them to be more successful at what we’re doing.”

The vendor’s cloud service provider business is growing at 40 percent quarter-over-quarter as more resellers being to offer services that leverage the public cloud, said Stanton.

“We’re 100 percent non-services. Everything our customers require, we say, ‘okay, let’s go to our Veeam accredited service providers (VASPs) who can help with the deployment of services.’ We drive that even on the high margin services,” said Stanton, adding that competitors like Commvault earn 25 percent of their revenue from professional services.

“We put that back into our channel partners. The company won’t even compete with them at deploying services to deploy large enterprise customers,” he said.

The company says more than 20 percent of partners now offer ‘hybrid’ offerings, mixing traditional resale with cloud service provisioning.