Veeam notes greater partner collaboration

Veeam has seen increasing collaboration across its channel as partners start to work together to sell a more complete solution.

The data management and backup specialist recently held its VeeamON event, which included the roll-out of more expanded cloud-native capabilities and discussion around its marketplace as it looked to add more depth for partners looking to support multicloud environments.

On the channel front, William Largent, CEO and chairman of the board at Veeam, said the firm appreciated the value that its partners delivered and it had seen growth in its recent financial numbers. “We’ve had a fantastic year from the perspective of new customers,” he said.

From a UK&I perspective, that activity has included higher levels of collaboration across the partner ecosystem, according to Alex Walsh, manager of channels and alliances, UK and Ireland at Veeam.

“One of the great things that we’ve seen over the last 12 to 18 months is a real start of partners working together,” he said. “We’ve seen that the partner network has evolved, and there is a real gravitation towards providing the best-in-breed solution, which also means being able to do it correctly.”

What that looked like over the past six months was greater levels of cooperation between VARs, MSPs and cloud specialists, said Walsh.

“What’s really happening there is, they’re enabling themselves to bring real value to that customer and allow them to get the solution they need,” he added. “They are starting to work more closely together and I think what we’ve been able to do is help those conversations happen between what used to be competitors and making them more alliances to each other now.”

Veeam has seen its channel grow from a handful to a significant network of partners across UK&I and Walsh said it was continuing to manage that expanding base.

“Every vendor starts with a small channel. I’m really proud of how, with our channel, we’ve managed to retain those relationships,” he said.

Walsh echoed the comments from CEO Largent about how the partners were driving the business forward: “The results that we saw in Q1 were overwhelmingly positive for the UK and Ireland in terms of growth with our partners.”

He said there was growth across the board, but the silver partners had been actively increasing their business over the course of 2021.

Looking ahead, Walsh was optimistic that the routes to market for partners were widening and that customers had started to make strategic decisions about their data management needs.

“As we look at the second half of the year, we can see a lot more projects coming back again, compared to probably the same time last year,” he said. “So I think we’ve clearly seen a shift in terms of what our partners are going to market with.”