CHICAGO – Veeam should no longer be viewed as a point product solution vendor for the small-to-mid-size business market. With the unveiling of its Hyper-Availability Enterprise vision at the VeeamON conference, the Baar, Switzerland-based vendor can now address multiple segments of the market from basic backup and replication to many other environments.
For the more than 50,000 worldwide channel partners in its network, Veeam has now given them the ability to sell, for the first-time, a full suite for business continuity solutions in a market that is increasingly producing data from the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and blockchain.
Jeff Crum, Veeam’s director of global product marketing, told EChannelNews, there are a couple of drivers for this vision.
The first is Veeam’s desire to go up-market and become an enterprise vendor. The second is the challenge with the scale of hyper-critical data and hyper sprawl. “These are resonating with CIOs…and now we have the product line that will resonate with them,” Crum said.
This move by Veeam towards the enterprise saw Co-CEO Peter McKay hire more experienced sales people for this market along with the company’s decision to support physical servers and the addition to centrally manage agents of any kind with the Orchestration product.
The strategy behind the Hyper-Availability Enterprise vision is Veeam’s belief that data produced by larger organizations needs a new type of solution that includes behavior analytics and a way to manage all these insights in a self-service fashion.
The company is now working to promote the new platform vision to its channel partners. Veeam’s base of partners historically were focused on backup only, according to Crum. Now they will be able to address larger environments with solutions for taking a virtual server back to physical, SaaS, disaster recovery, and Office 365. “The platform can enable the channel because of the broader vision instead of just being one product,” Crum added.
Another issue Veeam is trying to resolve is scalability. Crum said, the product portfolio can now support a larger number servers and agents with the availability console and it can provide for distributed computing for branch offices as well.
“Channel partners will now have the ability to go back and be more comprehensive with customers beyond just data protection. When I think about channel partners, they can now go beyond backup and recovery and make it a proactive business with value to accelerate innovation with DevOps. We are arming partners with a broader value-added story over just insurance,” Crum said.
Veeam Canada Channel Chief Damian Serjeant said the focus for 2018 is to continue to work very closely with ecosystem partners such as Cisco, HPE, NetApp, Pure Storage, Nutanix, Microsoft, and AWS on delivering full end-to-end availability solutions for customers.
“In Canada, we have a very aggressive growth plan. We currently have more than 10,000 customers. As we continue to grow and invest in the channel, the plan is to work very closely with our partners to grow our footprint with large Canadian organizations,” he said.
It’s important to note that Veeam executives at the VeeamON show consistently said the company is not abandoning the small to mid-size space.
Each area will have a dedicated sales team assigned, Crum said. Also, the company has released its five stages strategy that is intended to be flexible to address a wide variety of customers.
Those five stages are:
- Stage 1, Backup: Backup and recovery of all workloads no matter of outages, attack, loss, or theft.
- Stage 2, Aggregation: Data protection and availability in multi-cloud environments.
- Stage 3, Visibility: Data management across multi-cloud environments with unified visibility and control.
- Stage 4, Orchestration: The ability to transfer data to the best location in multi-cloud environments for business continuity, compliance, and security. This is also to ensure customers have the best use of resources for their operation.
- Stage 5, Automation: Data as a self-managing asset. It can learn to be backed up by itself as well as migrated to other locations based on business needs. It can also secure itself during anomalous activity and be recovered instantaneously.
Crum added that customers of various sizes can stay in one of these stages for a long time, while other customers with a small number of servers may want to do more with their data and need to move into another stage or two.
