The new program differs from Veeam’s established Alliance programs in having a broader objective of building out a Veeam ecosystem where they are embedded in others’ solutions.
MIAMI – At their VeeamON event here. Veeam has announced a new strategic initiative to deliver tightly integrated unified solutions to customers – the ‘with Veeam’ program. The program involves partnerships with enterprise storage vendors that combine Veeam software with the partner’s infrastructure hardware and management stacks. The ‘with Veeam’ program is independent of Veeam’s long time strategic Alliance programs.
Ratmir Timashev, Veeam’s Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing, explained the basic concept of the strategy to ChannelBuzz at the Nutanix .NEXT event two weeks ago, where the company’s newly announced partnership with Nutanix around Nutanix Mine HCI solution for secondary storage. He drew a rough map of the ecosystem on a napkin, but its purposes were clear enough.
“Six and a half years ago, we decided to work with what HPE was doing with 3PAR, and it took us a year to do that integration, manually,” Timashev said. “Then we spent a year doing another manual integration with EMC, and another year doing one with NetApp. By then, we had learned enough that we could create universal storage APIs, and we created an SDK, and 20 other partners manually integrated themselves. Now, we are using this same strategy on secondary storage.”
In addition to the Nutanix partnership, one additional partnership that is part of ‘with Veeam’ has been announced. ExaGrid Backup with Veeam was announced three weeks ago, and unlike Nutanix Mine, which is scheduled to appear in Q4, ExaGrid Backup with Veeam is currently available in the U.S. and Canada.
“We are working on another manual integration as well, with NetApp, and have already started the work,” Timashev added. “It’s time to bring our experience to the next level, in the same way that we work with Nutanix and Exagrid. We believe many of our existing partners will join,” Timashev said. “Our goal is to build a very broad ecosystem of secondary storage systems with our partners.”
“These are not OEM relationships, but are about getting Veeam embedded in partner ecosystems,” said Ken Ringdahl, Vice President, Global Alliance Architecture, at Veeam. “Some of this is to combat newer competitors in the market but it’s not just about that.”
“This is not just a bundle,” said Danny Allan, Veeam’s VP of Product Strategy, with particular reference to the Nutanix integration. “It’s a real engineering effort for us, which is all software-based.”
The nature of the ‘with Veeam’ partnerships will vary. The Nutanix partnership will produce an offering which will go to market with a single SKU, while the Exagrid one is a meet-in-the-channel partnership as far as the go-to-market motion goes.
“The Nutanix partnership is much more significant as a result, because it is a really seamless offering,” said Carey Stanton, Vice President of Global Alliances at Veeam.
Whether a specific joint solution will be delivered by the Veeam channel, by the the infrastructure partner and their channel, or jointly, will always depend on the details of the specific partnership.
Stanton also emphasized that the ‘with Veeam’ partnerships are fundamentally different from the partnerships in the Veeam Alliance programs – even though they will be with some of the same companies.
“It’s completely different from our traditional vendor program,” he said. “They don’t even report to the same people.”
