Veeam has also introduced new bundles with HPE and with Cisco, which are now available through Ingram Micro.
Kevin Rooney, Veeam’s VP of Channel Sales
Increasing their enterprise penetration has been at the top of Veeam’s priority list for several years. They believe they now have now achieved enough momentum in the space to accelerate it further through the creation of an enterprise-focused internal sales force, which will be formally established early next year. Veeam is not departing from its channel model, however. The new enterprise sales force will work with Veeam partners, not sell direct.
“In 2017, we are adding an enterprise sales force for the first time in the company’s history,” said Kevin Rooney, Veeam’s VP of Channel Sales. “Before, we segmented by the size of the opportunity rather than by the size of the company.” The idea is to put together an enterprise sales force that covers “all the NFL cities” – metropolitan areas large enough to have an NFL team.
“We now have 20 [inside reps] onboard, and will have another 20-35 by the first quarter next year,” Rooney said. “Mike Durso also came with our new President and COO, Peter McKay, from VMware, as VP of enterprise sales in North America. We wont leave the SMB – more than 40 per cent of our business comes from 250 seats or less – but the fastest growing area for us is the enterprise. So we felt the need at this time, given that growth, to put a sales force in to support it. The enterprise business is all still channel led. However, we believed we needed to add more resources to help partners.”
Rooney said that McKay has brought new focus to Veeam’s enterprise push.
“He sees the opportunity in the enterprise as significant – that’s why he brought Mike on. He is developing a clear strategy to develop more business there,” Rooney added. “We started our 2017 planning in August, as we are looking to take things even further in 2017.”
Similar enhanced effort is taking place in Veeam’s service provider initiatives.
“We will continue to add to our cloud field organization to support our service provider strategy,” Rooney said. “Our cloud business has been growing over 100 per cent a year for us, and we expect well over 100 per cent again in 2017.”
Veeam is also ramping up its Asia-Pacific presence.
“This is new for us,” Rooney indicated. “In this region we had never before really expanded beyond Australia.”
Another factor Rooney sees as driving growth in 2017 is new bundles that Veeam recently added in conjunction with vendor partners HPE and Cisco. Veeam Availability Solution for HPE StoreOnce is a complete availability solution that leverages HPE ProLiant servers and HPE StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance with Veeam Backup Essentials software. Veeam Availability Solution for Cisco UCS combines Cisco Unified Computing Systems and Veeam technologies.
“The bundles haven’t been announced publicly, but are significant,” he stated. “We’ve always played well with alliance partners, but now we are bringing these solutions with two strong vendor partners to bear together. We are offering our channel partners best of breed opportunities which we haven’t had available in the past.”
These integrated bundles were introduced a month ago, and at the Ingram Micro ONE show this week, they became available through Ingram Micro.
“Ingram, specifically, is an unbelievable opportunity because of their business intelligence, in that they can bring in the strongest partners from among their other vendors,” Rooney noted.
Rooney also indicated that while Veeam continues to set new records for its number of transacting partners in North America, the plan for 2017 is to deepen their investment with their more strategic partners.
“My focus in 2017 will be to go deeper and wider with partners that have invested more with us – partners that have built their backup and replication focus on Veeam.”
Those partners, Rooney said, are determined by a combination of certification, and technical sales proficiency, not just revenue from transactional relationships.
“We want partners who lead with Veeam as their go-to in the space,” he indicated. “We will commit selling resources to working with them, and direct distribution resources to support them. I’m more interested in those who see Veeam as a strategic relationship.”
Rooney also indicated the number of such partners has increased because of an intensification by Veeam over the past year in getting partners to up their certifications.
“Distribution partners like Ingram Micro were a tremendous help here, because they were often the teachers on these technical courses,” Rooney said.
