Veeam looks to channel to drive growth in ‘second act’

Veeam Software co-founder Ratmir Timashev says the channel will play “the most crucial role” in its plans to become a dominant force in the hybrid cloud data management market.

Speaking to Microscope at VeeamON 2019 in Miami, Timashev said leaders are created in the first two or three years following the establishment of any new market.

“For us, it’s critically important to win in the next two or three years in the hybrid cloud data management market. If we win that market, we will dominate it for the next 5-10 years,” he said, comparing its strategy to the vendor’s success in the VMware backup market.

“We were not the first but when we came, we crushed the competition, and we own it. Everybody believes that we created that market, because we won that market in the first three, four years,” he said.

Veeam this week announced it has hit has now exceeded $1 billion in annual bookings, and that ‘act II’ of the company will continue to rely heavily on partners for growth.

Timashev said Veeam stands apart from its competition in its hundred percent channel sales strategy, as well as being a private company, resolutely software-only, and handing over all services opportunities to its partners.

James Mundle, VP worldwide channels said the company was working out how to enable its 60,000-plus channel and service provider partners to capture opportunities in the cloud data management space, which the company says will be worth more than $15 billion by 2020.

“What do we need to do to ensure that we can support act II with hybrid cloud as we drive the business to $2 billion?” he added “What is hybrid data cloud management in the future? How is that going to impact the channel ecosystem of partners? How do you bring cloud and traditional resale together? What’s that true opportunity? And how do you enable that success? We need to figure out how that evolves over time to make it work.”

Timashev noted that while backup is still critical, customers are now building hybrid clouds with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, IBM and Google, and to succeed in this changing environment, Veeam has had to adapt.

Initially focused on server virtualization for VMware environments, in recent years, Veeam said it has expanded to deliver integration with multiple hypervisors, physical servers and endpoints, along with public and SaaS-based workloads.

Elsewhere, Veeam is also eyeing the secondary storage market by partnering with Nutanix globally, and Exagrid initially in the US, to provide offerings that combine its software with their storage and HCI infrastructure hardware and management stacks.