New initiatives include a Veeam Accredited Service Partner program, the release candidate of a new Veeam Availability Console and new multi-tenancy in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

NEW ORLEANS – Two years ago, at the last VeeamON event in Las Vegas, then-CEO Ratmir Timashev highlighted the move to the cloud as a key strategic priority for Veeam – and by extension its partners – in his address at the Partner Day event. Since then, Timashev has stepped upstairs to the Founder role, where his focus is more on grand strategy and possible acquisitions. But the channel-focused announcements made on Partner Day this year show that the company’s cloud focus has only continued to grow. Indeed, the new announcements were all about helping reseller and service provider partners helping customers move to and manage data in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

“We need to move with our partners to the new model, the cloud consumption model, and work with you closely to deliver these services to our customers,” Timashev told partners in a panel session as part of the Partner Day keynote.

Veeam made multiple partner-focused announcements on Partner Day, and they all revolved around the cloud to some degree. One of the broader announcements was the new Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) program, designed to drive partner services revenue and engagement.

“As the customer engagement model changes, as a vendor we have a choice on how to do things,” said Peter McKay, Veeam’s co-CEO and President. “We could build out professional services like our competitors to compete with our partners. We could leave it entirely to partners. Or we could build a hybrid approach to support partners. We recognize the need now for us to offer more professional services. But we believe they need to be driven by the partner ecosystem. So we are launching a new  Veeam Accredited Service Partner program,  to drive bigger and better revenue opportunities.”

The VASP program offers members marketing promotion benefits, including documentation to answer RFPs, logos and banners for promotions and online marketing, as well as visibility for end-users on the Veeam website. It also provides access to best-practice technical guidance and documentation in the Veeam Service Catalog and Technical Library, and to dedicated senior pre-sales advisors. Members are also entitled to Not-For-Resale demo licenses to demonstrate Availability Suite – regardless of their level in the Veeam Partner Program.

A new Veeam Availability Console, v2, Release Candidate was also announced to provide everything a service provider or distributed enterprise needs to deploy, manage and monitor Veeam-powered Availability services.

“It lets you increase revenues by delivering services for virtualized workloads, physical workloads, and cloud workloads, with built-in out of the box billing and invoicing,” said Danny Allan, VP Cloud and Alliance Strategy at Veeam.

Allan stressed that Veeam’s partner commitment will continue unabated in a cloud world.

“No one cloud is sufficient for business availability,” he said. “Some are better at compute, storage, networking, or compliance. We believe in the value of regional and national partners that drive the Veeam engine. We don’t think customers will ever be going direct to cloud with no one helping them on the journey.”

The new Veeam Availability Console is planned to be generally available in Q3.

Veeam also announced new multi-tenancy, multi-repository and automation capabilities in the 1.5 version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

“Demand for this protection has been exploding, and the product has been doing very well,” Allan said. “But we didn’t want to give you a siloed tool. This iteration is designed for partners, with its multi-tenant and multi-repository capabilities.”

Other channel focused announcements included new Veeam CDP and vCloud Director integration for greatly-enhanced Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) capabilities, a new Tape-as-a-Service offering to put tape backups in the cloud, for partners who have customers who still want to use tape, and a new Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Directory to connect VARs and VCSP.

Cloud will also be central in Veeam’s major new product announcements, which will be announced Wednesday.

Paul Mattes, VP of the Global Cloud Group at Veeam, told partners about his days with Microsoft in the earliest days of Azure, back when it was known by the code name of “Red Dog,” when cloud was a concept well before its time.

‘I earned my scars building a cloud business,” he said. “The market just wasn’t ready for cloud when Azure came out – it just wasn’t. That maturity had to happen over time and it took a while.”

Now, Mattes said, the moment is here for partners to capitalize in the cloud, taking Veeam’s simplicity theme of ‘it just works’ and applying it to the cloud.

“Partners are absolutely critical in this,” he said. “This is where cloud stops becoming a hobby.”