Veeam ending the year with growth across the channel

Veeam has continued to enhance its channel offerings, even against the backdrop of the pandemic, and has kept communication levels high with partners.

As everyone in the industry, the firm adopted virtual communications tools to continue operating as normal, and for Alex Walsh, manager of channels UK&I at Veeam, the past few months have been an opportunity to keep talking to partners.

“The flexibility we get with working from home makes it a lot easier for me to speak to partners that I wouldn’t typically get a chance to, so that’s been a real positive for me,” he said.

Veeam rolled out some enhancements to its ProPartner programme in September, when it revealed that it was working with 50 accredited services partners and had awarded the Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) ranking to those that had demonstrated high levels of expertise and technical knowledge.

Walsh said those enhancements had been part of ongoing efforts to increase support for partners. “It allows us to have a slightly different conversation with those partners because, from our perspective, it’s an investment back into the channel. When they hit those competencies, they’re able to accrue rebate which they can invest back into growing their overall business,” he added.

The move to subscription licences has been a bit of a theme in the Veeam channel this year, with that demand accelerating in the past couple of quarters. “Moving to a more annuity-based subscription licence that we are selling to our customers is something that’s been really taken on this year,” said Walsh.

Veeam also deepened its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with announcements coming out of the public cloud giant’s re:Invent conference in recent weeks, and the vendor has always leaned on its ecosystem to make sure it can reach a wide number of partners and work with an increasing number of vendors.

“One of the advantages of Veeam is that we are platform-agnostic, in regards to storage. So when we look at all the hardware players, the dedupes or even, more and more, the public cloud providers like AWS, the beauty of it is we allow flexibility,” he said. “When we are looking at our go-to-market, players like AWS are very important to us.”

The firm is closing out the year with the channel having performed well and Walsh is looking to keep that momentum going into 2021.

“When we look at our top-level partners, the platinum and gold, we’ve experienced a lot of growth in that area. But we have also seen it in our silver and registered base, so the whole channel has grown,” he said.

Walsh added that the larger players had been closing a lot more enterprise deals, with larger values, and that had also contributed to the channel growth over the year.

“We have seen that growth continuing, and as we look into next year, the competencies that we outlined in the ProPartner programme will help us to define the strategy with those partners for next year. It will be a lot around making sure that we have the right licences available to those customers,” he said.