Veeam Walks Fine Line Between Channel, OEM Resellers

VEEAMON 2019 – Veeam Software has had to navigate a delicate path over the past few years to ensure there’s no conflict in its channel as it’s grown the number of resale partnerships with tech companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, NetApp and, most recently, hyperconverged infrastructure software maker Nutanix.

Veeam’s James Mundle

Since its inception, Veeam has been a 100% channel business and now has more than 60,000 partners, according to James Mundle, vice president of worldwide channels for the fast-growing cloud data backup and recovery software maker. Since 2017, Veeam officials have grown the company’s ecosystem of storage technology partners that resell Veeam software in their products.

It started in the primary storage segment with companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp and has since grown to more than 20 vendors, including Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Cisco and Pure Storage. The effort is part of a larger push to expand the reach of its software suite into enterprises by enabling customers to buy hardware with the Veeam software pre-installed.

More recently, Veeam has turned its focus to the secondary storage market, announcing partnerships this month with Nutanix and ExaGrid. At the VeeamON 2019 user conference in Miami this week, Ratmir Timashev, the company’s co-founder and executive vice president for sales and marketing, introduced the “with Veeam” program designed to bring on even more storage technology partners in the secondary market over the coming years.

The idea is to create a broad ecosystem of such partners to give organizations multiple options for bringing Veeam into their environments.

Veeam’s Kevin Rooney

As company pursued the strategy of resale partnerships with OEMs and other vendors, officials also knew that they had to ensure that their array of channel partners were not hurt, according to Veeam channel executives. That came with a lot of questions that needed to be answered.

“How will this impact the partner?” Kevin Rooney, vice president of Americas partner sales at Veeam asked Channel Futures. “If we’re going to go down these reseller agreements with these large companies, how does the partner play in this? How do we make sure it’s still profitable? How do we make sure we don’t punish one over the other?”

What they came up with was a way that Veeam channel partners would be rewarded when an appliance with Veeam software on board from one of the reseller partners was sold, Rooney said. The is ensuring that the Veeam…