Veeam attacks new customer base through channel

Veeam Software on-boarded more than 3600 new customers across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) in 2018, driven by a strategy built on “100 per cent” channel engagement.

At a regional level, the data management vendor billed $75 million in bookings during the 12-month period, backed by growth of 36 per cent and 24 per cent in bookings and transactions respectively.

“When there’s change, there’s Veeam,” said Shaun McLagan, senior vice president of APJ at Veeam. “Customers today are looking for a piece of innovation to add to their environment, whether that’s across hybrid cloud, public cloud or hyper-converged markets – they are doing something.

“It’s no longer the days of ‘we had an orange one, let’s swap that out for a green one’. It’s now more a case of we’re going to spin up innovation and we’re looking at net new technology. This allows us to land and expand, drive new workloads and carry out innovation for organisations.”

Speaking to Channel Asia on the sidelines of VeeamON Forum Australia 2019 in Sydney, McLagan said the vendor is responding to regional appetite for transformation at a customer level, triggered by a need to replace legacy infrastructure with emerging technologies and solutions.

“IT directors are disrupting themselves before they get disrupted,” he added. “They are no longer wanting to run 3-6 year-old architectures because they don’t want to be seen as the ‘no’ department.

“When that happens they get taken over by someone in the business with a credit card running up applications in Amazon Web Services. Instead, they are now looking at what ‘quicker, faster and smarter’ looks like. We’re on-boarding net new customers at a rapid rate and growing at 5-6x the market.”

According to McLagan, APJ represents a “technology hungry theatre” for partners to operate within, a region billed as the vendor’s fastest growing location globally, spanning commercial, enterprise and small to medium-sized business (SMB) customers.

“There’s no doubt that we can service the largest workloads to the smallest,” McLagan explained. “We have no problem with the technology stack and we’re playing where innovation is happening.

“If I tried to find a vertical where we are winning more than others, or a company size, nothing jumps out. We look at whether at company is looking at innovation, then that becomes a great Veeam company.

“We’re winning in media, retail, banking and finance and public sector, for example. Our biggest second quarter deal was a public sector win in Brunei so we’re winning in all places.”

Driven through a 100 per cent channel model, McLagan said partners of all shapes, sizes and focus areas can prosper in an ecosystem housing multiple alliance vendors and routes to market.

Whether a cloud service provider, system integrator or reseller – or a specialised sector partner in healthcare – Veeam is assuming a position of Switzerland in a bid to attract new customers through the channel.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Pure Storage could provide the infrastructure, for example, likewise AWS or Microsoft in the cloud – for McLagan, the choice is with the channel.

“There’s tonnes of market out there for our partners to chase,” he said. “We’re not seeing partner conflict and we’re not seeing all our channel jump on the same tenders that come out. Our channel dictates where we win.”

Customer success

Located in Townsville, Cairns and Singapore, James Cook University partnered with Veeam to “ensure 100 per cent data availability” for more than 22,000 students and over 4700 staff.

“We have an incredible record of research in marine biology and are world number one, the only Australian university with that status,” said Swain Kirk, head of ICT infrastructure solutions at James Cook University. “Like most organisations, there is an issue of data explosion because students require data anywhere, anytime and anyplace.

“Following a proof of concept, Veeam was introduced into our environment and immediately enacted an outcome of 100 per cent reliability of uptime, which was also reflected in an internal audit. We were audited on our ability to back-up structured and unstructured data with the results of the audit risk committee highlighted as a major achievement in back-up.

“We don’t have the issues we experienced before and there is a difference between 97/98 per cent availability compared to 100 per cent. We have a fleet of approximately 1200 virtual machines, take two per cent of that failing and it becomes a considerable number.”

Furthermore, Veeam recently partnered with Infinity Consulting Technology in Malaysia to bring data back-up and availability capability to property developer, Worldwide Holdings.

As reported by Channel Asia, recovery time in this instance has been slashed by 90 per cent, providing the same service that used to take eight hours or more to less than an hour.

“Competition will come at us but we just have to maintain our loyalty and level of customer experience,” added Asanga Wanigatunga, vice president of cloud and service providers across APJ at Veeam. “Our growth has been through customers shifting the entire application stack and challenging the software stack in the middle. We’re growing through this transition phase at a customer-level.

“We’re operating in an established category and our advantage comes in our history in virtualisation. This has provided us with credibility to show that we’re innovating fast. Customers don’t know what tomorrow will look like so they are banking on a platform vendor which specialises in data protection and availability.

“Whether customers move to the cloud, hybrid or back on-premises, they need a vendor that can go on that journey as opposed to buying a point solution for hyper-converged, data protection or cloud.”

As reported by sister publication Reseller News, and more globally speaking, Veeam is eyeing up data management expansion through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), following a cash injection of US$500 million.

The expansion plans come amid a new round of funding from Insight Venture Partners in January, backed up by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), designed to accelerate the next phase of growth for the vendor.

As a result, Veeam aims to expand through both organic growth – such as portfolio innovation and geographical expansion – and via M&A activity into adjacent markets.

James Henderson attended VeeamON Forum Australia 2019 in Sydney as a guest of Veeam.