GEC NEWS WIREVeeam, which is now offering backup to virtual, physical and cloud platforms, is expecting further growth now following a number of new additions to benefit enterprise customers with the launch of its Veeam Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud, including the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 product release. EC MEA had an exclusive round up with Omar Akhtar, Regional Channel Manager – Middle East & SAARC at Veeam Software about what the IT sector in GCC and its partners can expect from Veeam in 2017.
- How can Veeam’s channel partners expect to grow their revenue stream and continue being successful as part of its channel ecosystem?
Firstly, I should make it clear that unlike other vendors, we’re a 100-percent channel-focused company. We are continuously adding to the revenue stream of our ProPartners by offering new products and features. Recently this has included quicker recovery times of data, integration with Microsoft Office365, and tools that provide greater visibility and monitoring. We do this because we’re committed to enabling our partners to keep the 30-40 percent annual growth rates they’ve received in recent years.
- How will your channel partners benefit from Veeam’s big launch in August 2016 of the Veeam Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud?
The announcement last August was hugely significant for our ProPartners because it enables them to up-sell and cross-sell a host of new services that sell business continuity and tell the broader ‘availability’ story that is at the core of everything we do.
As part of the launch, Veeam has included new products such as Veeam Availability Orchestrator, Veeam Availability Console, Agents for Windows and Linux, and new capabilities for Azure and Amazon Web Services. With these, we close the loop between physical servers, the virtual environment and public cloud. Our new products will have a major impact on Veeam’s partner market penetration.
I think this launch really made it clear to the market that we’re not just about data backup. People understand more broadly now the importance of data availability and 24.7.365 uptime.
- Veeam has a number of alliance partnerships in existence, but what else is Veeam planning to do to make its software even easier for the reseller community to sell?
Building on the relationships with the likes of Dell EMC, HPE, Cisco, VMware, Microsoft (and IBM in v10 next year), we believe our channel partners are looking for us to further expand the coverage to include seamless support of all public cloud providers (Azure, AWS, IBM SoftLayer, etc.). Larger customers tend to have a presence in all the major public cloud providers and therefore Veeam support across all of them will remove any potential roadblocks for resellers. We’re also delivering more in the way of Solution Design documents similar to the recent Cisco Validated Design (CVD), which covers the availability with Veeam on the Cisco Hyperflex platform.
- How do you see Veeam making an impact in 2017 on the (country) technology landscape?
In 2017 we and our partners will continue to pursue the enterprise business, but also build out our strong SMB and commercial customer base and drive the availability of our customer’s data as they digitize and transform their companies. Our partners have been such a critical component to Veeam’s success to date, we look forward to continuing that globally over the coming years.
