Our Exponential Growth is Translating into Profits for our Partners: Veeam

Shiva Pillay, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Veeam Software, and Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist, Veeam, speaks to Kalpana Singhal on how the channel-focused organization has enabled partners to leverage on its impressive YoY growth in APJ

Data Management in a hybrid or multi cloud environment is a major challenge for most of the organizations. How is Veeam positioned to address this challenge?

Shiva – We’ve always differentiated ourselves because of our ability to look forward and also the strength in the products that we release to the market. We were born in the virtualization phase; we don’t have the legacy debt that comes with most of our competition. We knew very early that cloud is going to be the next big wave and we have been working towards it. We have been working with cloud in focus; we offer native protection for the three big cloud providers and continue to provide support for those. We are now building competencies around Kubernetes with Kasten acquisition, which is the next phase after hybrid cloud. Hence, our strategy has always been to focus on the trends early-on where customers will move. This way, we prepare beforehand for the upcoming technology waves and our differentiation is that we provide simple, reliable and flexible solutions catering to our customer’s requirements.

Anthony – Just to add to that, we have a true platform now that covers physical cloud, SaaS applications and virtual. While running a workload on AWS, customers can install small footprint from the marketplace and backup the AWS workloads. But if the same customer has backup that is still on-premises under VMware, they can then link the two through Veeam backup and replication platform and manage the policies and backups from single console. Mobility is critical in today’s time, hence, our data format is self-descripting and doesn’t rely on any hardware, which essentially means that it is hardware agnostic. Hence, we are nicely positioned to tap the modern data management and protection space.

Veeam recently reported 25 percent growth in Q1 2021. Can you please talk about the highlights of the achievement and the reasons behind the growth?

Shiva – We have seen an ARR increase of 27 percent YoY in APJ. The India business was rocking in Q1 2021. India is in fact one of the shining stars in the APJ region in term of customer engagement and partner landscape. Speaking about our expansion in India, we are still new in terms of the time we entered in this country; hence, opportunities are abundant for us. We are currently at #3 position and are targeting top position in terms of market share. India is among the fastest moving geographies to move to subscription licensing. Customers are quick in leveraging the advantages of the Veeam’s universal licensing platform that is unique. In addition to this, globally we managed to release 17 new products and updates in 2020, which gives confidence to our customers to keep leveraging Veeam solutions.

Please talk about your go to market strategy in APJ for 2021.

Shiva – We’re a 100% channel company. The biggest component to our GTM strategy is that we rely on our partners. Our growth strategy makes it very attractive for our 2000 + active resellers to work with us as we grow, and help them grow their business around the complementary services. The second component is around making sure to help them deliver services. Our service provider business (VCSP business) is another area where we’re seeing significant expansion. As customers look to buy things as a service, we’re helping service providers deliver to our customer base. In terms of our GTM strategy internally, we continue to expand and are going to add about 50 headcount to the APJ team, which is a significant number for this year. So, Veeam is in a very strong shape financially; we’re independent and can help drive future investment into the markets.

Can you please brief us about your channel footprint in APJ region? And what are your recent initiatives for channel partners in the APJ region, including that in India?

Shiva –We have about 30 distributors and over 2000 active resellers across APJ. Our ProPartner Network is designed to provide our partners tools and technologies to help create demand for their customer base. It also helps them educate and build competencies with various certifications to drive and push Veeam’s products. In addition, we work with global system integrators and also have a massive alliance business. In our alliance business, we work with major infrastructure players as well as cloud providers, to help provide technology to our customers.

How are you enabling solution providers to build skills around data protection, Kubernetes, disaster recovery and data management?

Shiva – Veeam’s accreditation and constant training programs are designed at working with partners and upskilling them in technology areas like backup, data management and Kubernetes.

It’s a combination of acquiring new partners while leveraging the existing ones and constantly training and developing them. Anthony spends a lot of time training and educating these partners and service providers, about the new tools.

Anthony – With the new modern data protection platform, education is very important. We are trying to lead the market and in that course, we acquired Kasten last year. It’s not just a technology acquisition, but a thought leadership acquisition. We effectively acquired the market leader in the Kubernetes space. That gives us the customer mindshare where we can educate the market and take the lead.

Please talk about your top channel priorities and focus areas for the next couple of years.

Shiva – Our primary focus is to drive profitability for our channel partners. Since we are a 100% channel company, it’s important to ensure that our channel partners drive profits and stay excited to work with us. Our priority is to ensure that our growth translates into the growth of our channel ecosystem as well. In the first  quarter of 2021, we have seen a 27 percent YoY increase in ARR across APJ, and we want our partners to grow with us. So our expansion lies in our channel footprint’s expansion and it comes with investments into training and joint demand generation.