Platform approach driving Veritas channel growth

Veritas is encouraging its channel partners to view the release of the latest version of its backup product as a moment to embrace its platform approach and pitch the company on that basis to customers.

The vendor recently released version 8.3 of its NetBackup product, integrating it more deeply into its Enterprise Data Services (EDS) Platform, and giving the channel a product that could help customers fend off ransomware as well as make data protection in the cloud more straightforward.

Jamie Farrelly, vice-president of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) channel at Veritas, said that NetBackup marked a moment when its channel could not only talk to customers about data protection but pitch the firm in a way that was different to many competitors.

“What we’ve been talking to our partners about intently is viewing Veritas as a much more holistic answer to the multiple business issues in relation to data management. It is very key for us that our partners and our customers understand the difference between point product vendors and the portfolio and EDS platform that Veritas is working hard to bring to fruition,” he said.

“It becomes much easier for a channel partner to sell at a business level by referring back to technology but not being totally pegged in by talking about one product. You can lead with NetBackup to an existing customer, or a new customer, but what you are really talking about is four things: data risk, being more efficient with highly distributed data, governance and visibility, and – most importantly – the journey to the cloud,” he added.

He said that a partner talking about data protection and insights would often find a welcome audience at a customer level.

“Once organisations understand that data is key, you have to put protection at the centre of that,” he added. “That’s why 8.3 and our technology vision in its entirety represents a huge value to our partners and customers on its simplicity and its overarching ability to get data protected.’

Throughout the pandemic, Veritas has been working closely with its top partners to help drive growth and has increased the support and communication across its channel base.

The vendor recently held its first Partner Vision event to drive awareness and enablement around its technology and to underline the programmes that the channel could get involved with, and Farrelly said that its support strategy had delivered growth.

“We are growing with our channel partners and a large part of our strategy has been to double-down on our most committed and capable partners – which tend to be our platinum partners, though not exclusively – and we have used this remote mobile working to really spend a lot of time communicating and interacting with our platinum partners and most capable distributors as well,” he said.

He added that it had been working hard to “activate” some of its enterprise customers and engage them with partners.

“What we have done is taken 3,000 of our customers and successfully aligned them to about 50 of our platinum partners across the whole of EMEA, and we are working with those platinum partners side-by-side and in parallel to go and have a much more comprehensive data management conversation,” he said.

At the back end, the vendor has also significantly increased rebates that platinum partners can get by selling NetBackup and additional technology into those customers.

“Veritas is going to partner and assist our platinum partners in our very top accounts. In our tier two enterprise accounts, we are going to help partners to lead and gain more margin when they execute a more holistic sale,” he added.

“We’ve got some really good double-digit and even triple-digit growth from just being laser-focused and asking our partners to align with us on a subset of our enterprise accounts,” he said.