Lenovo’s enhanced relationship with Veeam is but one part of a much broader initiative they are announcing Thursday at their Lenovo Transform event.
Carey Stanton, Vice President of Global Alliances at Veeam
Today, Veeam is announcing a significant expansion of their technology partnership with Lenovo. They are deepening the existing partnership which saw Veeam Intelligent Data Management and Availability solutions integrate with Lenovo’s V-Series SANs and their Nutanix and VMware-based hyperconverged products. It now has a Go-to-Market component. For the first time, Lenovo is selling the Veeam solutions on its own price list as part of an integrated package. Veeam is also emphasizing, that while Lenovo continues to partner with other availability vendors, and their expanded relationship is by no means an exclusive one, it does put them on a different tier from their competitors with Lenovo.
“Both Lenovo and ourselves have many strategic partners,” said Carey Stanton, Vice President of Global Alliances at Veeam. “This issue is how high you are on the stack. Lenovo in this case was looking to expand its footprint by selling broader solutions beyond just the hardware. It’s also about having their sales and marketing teams being able to position their offerings as all-in-one solutions.”
The move with Veeam is part of a new strategy Lenovo will be announcing this week at their Transform event in New York City.
“This is part of a series of initiatives they are announcing later this week at Lenovo Transform,” Stanton said. The details of those initiatives are still embargoed, so can’t be talked about here.
“It is a very significant shift, which will change the way that you think of Lenovo,” Stanton said. “We are very happy to be a part of this. For us, it’s a case where one plus one equals four.”
Veeam is not the only Lenovo strategic partner impacted by the shift.
“We are one of a couple of key software companies with whom they are expanding their relationship, and the only availability vendor,” Stanton said. “They assessed all the availability vendors they are partnered with and they selected us. It doesn’t give us an exclusive relationship with them in the space, but it does give us a principal one.”
“It’s a major expansion of our business relationship that impacts their V-Series SANs and their VX [VMware] and HX [Nutanix] hyperconverged solutions,” said Ken Ringdahl, VP of Global Alliance Architecture at Veeam. “It will create a lot of synergies between our two eosystems.”
This is the first time that Veeam has been sold on Lenovo’s price list.
“It is a complete net-new, which strengthens what we were doing at a technology level,” Stanton stated. “The new global reseller relationship allows them to sell Veeam on their paper. It’s not an OEM relationship. We will be involved with Lenovo and key joint partners in joint sales efforts. Lenovo will handle the Level 1 support, but we will handle all the Level 2 and Level 3 support calls.”
While this change was brought about by Lenovo’s changes in positioning, Stanton emphasized that this kind of deeper relationship is something that Veeam is looking to achieve with their key strategic partners.
“Alliances are critically important to our success,” he said. “This is a continued evolution of how we are going across all markets.”
