100% Partner Reliance Boosts Veeam Business During Pandemic | Sandeep Bhambure

Sandeep Bhambure, VP & MD, Veeam Software India & SAARC explains the dynamics of his partner ecosystem and how it helps in business growth.

What are the solutions and services in the Veeam portfolio and how was year 2020 for Veeam overall?

2020 was a very interesting year. It was a tough year because of the pandemic and now everything is slowly reviving back to its previous condition. My observation in terms of business is that we are seeing a sharp change in customer sentiment. Customers are looking at implementing technology in terms of business to increase their growth.

Veeam is the leader in the cloud data management space. We want to solve the challenges our customers are facing in their cloud environment, as today cloud is everything. Worldwide we have already crossed 400,000 customers, 83% of the virtual technology companies have deployed Veeam and using Veeam capabilities in cloud data management and backup. 69% of Global 2000 customers are using Veeam. We are growing 10 times faster in the market in 2019 as per the 2019 IDC software tracker.

In India Veeam is getting hundreds of customers every year, so we have seen a big growth of Veeam across all the verticals. We are a 100% channel oriented company. Our channels take the solutions we provide to the customers. We have a global ecosystem of reseller partners like CISCO, Lenovo, HP who carry Veeam in their price book. We have a huge coverage in the market and we are able to reach out to a large amount of customers.

How did Veeam help its partners remotely support its customers during the pandemic months?

The basic pillars of the availability platform that we have built upon are simple, flexible and reliable. Simplicity is the key strategy that Veeam has used to build this entire availability platform. Veeam is very simple and easy to use and deploy as hundreds and thousands of customers have downloaded Veeam worldwide.

The process of obtaining legacy software is very complicated that is being used by enterprise users and that is causing their businesses to slow down as it is not simple and easy like the Veeam software. In the pandemic time customer can just open the browser and manage the entire infrastructure for backup whether it is on physical, virtual or cloud. It is the simplicity and availability of Veeam that has helped customers run their business without interruption.

How are the existing SLAs impacted due to the different scenarios during the pandemic?

Today customers want 100% availability. That is what the business is demanding from IT to be always on, the business should not be down even for a few minutes. Across industries SLAs are being redraw because business are expected to work on multi cloud or hybrid cloud world. When workloads are running on AWS, then if a virtual machine goes down how quickly can you recover that or switch over to another virtual machine or AWS.

We also looked at the customer behaviour where we saw if a certain vendor does not have the services required, people are quick to switch to another vendor, so business have to be extremely agile in that case. If recovery time is concerned we have helped our customers recover virtual machines in a few minutes. Customers are looking to protect their entire data. In a cloud system if there is an attack, customers want all of their data protected and recovered. So we are helping the customers to protect their data and make it completely ransom ware attack proof.

How is the Veeam partner ecosystem structured and what help in terms of programs/incentives you offered to partners during pandemic?

We are a 100% partner oriented organization. We have partners across the SAARC region who do the transaction through Veeam distributors. This is for the traditional partners who resell the solutions. Then we have the cloud service partners. Why Veeam is liked so much by the partners is because we protect our partners. We do not cannibalise their revenue, and we do not compete with them. We leverage our partners to take the solutions to the market to implement our solutions. When they need any help at the back-end, we are there to help and support them. That is how the relation with our partners is and we support each other in the tough times.

How did Veeam specifically help partners as they faced cash flow challenges and in enablement of their customers?

There was no particular help in terms of direct cash flow is concerned. We have come across request from the partners for a certain reason, be it from the customer front that they need an extended service or support for a particular contract. Then we have always considered those service requests and requirements of the partners.

The Veeam software are on the subscription basis. This eases the pressure on the customer and the partner to invest upfront on these. The customers have the flexibility to use Veeam software at instances. Then partners have used this method to their advantage if the customer is having a cash flow problem then this can help then to face those challenges.

How did Veeam and its partners balance between retaining existing customers and acquiring new customers?

In the last 12 months we learned how important it is to be close with your customers. Everybody in the Veeam system from the partners downwards was close to their customers and help them in every way possible. For our existing customer we did assessment and help them to know what threat there could be. We helped them in leveraging their cloud portal so that they can increase their revenue.

One of our big customers faced a ransomware attack and lost lots of important data. We along with our partners worked for couple of nights to recover that data. We educated our customers how to protect their data from attacks, how they are increasing and so on. We partnered with new cloud service providers so that we can provide the cloud end point security services and attract new customers.

How did Veeam re-orient its partners towards conducting more digital selling?

The traditional partners understand the need of the change and quickly adapt to the changing ways of customers consuming technology particularly the acceleration of cloud. While new cloud service provider partners have emerged, the large providers recognized that they need to have a specialist cloud team and that kind of helped our agenda. We can work with this team as the traditional partners as they understand and appreciate the cloud business. We worked with the new clod division that they have formed, we helped then understand the challenges surrounding cloud data management and changing expectation from our customers for backup and data protection.

How did Veeam help the SMB customers especially during these challenging times?

There are pockets in the region which are SMB heavy. For example, the Gujarat market has manufacturing, marketing, healthcare and government business. We establish our presence either directly or through the distributers or partners in these regions across the country. We are present in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and address the commercial as well as the enterprise based customers. We work with value added large resellers in the markets of Tamil Nadu and Kerala who could reach out to their partner ecosystem and they could reach out to their customer base.

What are the new solutions and new alliances expected from Veeam in 2021?

Insight Partners acquired 100% of Veeam equity and if we look at our portfolio growth it is huge. This year we have announced VO version 5.0 which protects data, enhancing the capabilities to protect data. We released Veeam backup for AWS version 3 which helps AWS customers protect RDS. We will have many interesting announcements in this year and we are very excited about the visions and possibilities that this there this year.

What would be Veeam’s messages for both partners and customers?

The most important priority for the customer today is going to be increasing the revenue keeping the operational risks at bay, reducing risks in business ensuring the costs are in control. The customers when they look in the next decade of growth for them they should know the strategic foundations their business is going to be needed as far as IT, data recovery, protection and availability is concerned. There is a need of new learing needs to happen some courageous decisions need to be taken.

For the partners they need to understand the way customers are consuming technology and how cloud can help business be more agile on cutting down the cost enhancing customer experience and also be aware of the potential risk of moving business in a multi clod hybrid cloud world