Veritas has updated their traditional services program, but now they have modernized it to give partners more options than in the past.
Dennis Deane, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Veritas
Veritas Technologies has announced a strengthening of support for their MSP partners with the launch of the Veritas Managed Service Provider Program, a sub-program within Veritas Partner Force. The program builds on and updates what Veritas had done around MSP partners in the past, and offers flexible pricing models, and a broad range of training and enablement, including blueprints and support being provided by Veritas engineers.
“I joined Veritas just over two years ago to lead Global Strategic Alliances,” said Dennis Deane, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Veritas. “We had had about six different partner types – distis and VARs, GSIs, MSPs, cloud partners, and OEMs. I sit at the global level and my peers sit at the regional level. What has changed now is that we have formalized MSPs as a specific type.”
In terms of structure, Deane described the MSP program as a modified version of the Veritas GSI program.
“We created unique teams in every region to manage MSPs, and we added formality in terms of resource coverage,” he said. “We took raw ingredients and created a more structured program platform for them.”
Deane described what the MSP channel looks like.
“Some of our big MSP partners are colos who compete in the same space with Rackspace and Equinix,” he said. “There are also telcos, and VARs who have pivoted their business and now run on a public cloud infrastructure. We play with some MSSPs but not outright. This isn’t designed for true cybersecurity players. We partner with those who are strong in storage and infrastructure.”
The focus is also clearly on the enterprise.
“Our strategy hasn’t changed much there,” he said. “We don’t intend to go running after the SMB world, and we don’t want to go into point solutions. Our partners will typically have other partners who integrate with us around these.”
Veritas’ pricing model for MSPs is based on their experience with GSIs.
“We see three types of pricing models of GSIs,” Deane stated. “One is where they buy the license and own it. One is where they resell. And the third is an influencer model. When we look at MSPs, we see similar models, with them buying pools of license capacity, although typically on much smaller scale than the GSIs.” MSPs can take advantage of both subscription and consumption-based pricing options, in addition to commitment-based commercial models.
“We always had a managed services program of sorts in Veritas,” Deane said. “We have taken the model and dusted it off and modernized it, so that it follows an evolution from perpetual licensing to subscription, which we can now do in a standard way.”
The program has tiering with what Deane termed two distinct tiers.
“In addition to our MSP tier, which is most of the partners, our MSP Elite tier has significant requirements in terms of revenue and competency – and we provide them with resources. Internally, there’s a little bit of differentiation within each tier where we spent some time on partners based on revenue.”
In terms of enablement, the program allows Veritas-powered Backup-as-a-Service, Analytics-as-a-Service and Data Recovery-as-a-Service offerings to be rapidly engineered through Veritas providing blueprint reference architectures.
“With these blueprint architectures, we take our cumulative IP and then our engineers show up with those reference architectures, to assist the partner with these hands-on guided blueprints,” Deane stated.
MSP Elite program partners will also be eligible for joint go-to-market initiatives and product roadmap engagements, solutions development workshops and incentives.
“We have carved out MDF funding as a unique pool of funds, which are allocated depending on the investments that partners have committed to us,” Deane said. “For example, we expect service providers to be on the latest release of Veritas within six months. We are not a professional services business. We rely on our partners for that, and that includes releasing the best and most recent version of our product. I just had to deal with some customer complaints where this was not being done.”
