Veeam Increases Investment in the Channel

Veeam Software this week extended the benefits it provides partners via its ProPartner program as part of an effort to attract and retain channel partners at a time when competition across the entire data protection category has never been fiercer.

Gold and Platinum partners that exceed sales quotas on a quarterly or annual basis are now eligible for additional sales accelerators.

At the same time, Veeam is launching a marketing concierge service, which will collaboratively run multi-touch digital marketing campaigns on behalf of partners and has revamped Veeam University to create Veeam IQ, which is a partner training platform that can be accessed via the Veeam partner portal.

Finally, Veeam is making available additional incentives for sales, marketing, and technical staff that work within a partner organization.

Any successful approach to the channel requires IT vendors to pursue a holistic approach that extends all the way out to the field level, says James Mundle, vice president of worldwide channels at Veeam.

These latest updates reflect a channel strategy under which Veeam is committing to making additional resources available to the company’s best partners, says Mundle.

“We’re going to invest in the partners that invest in Veeam,” says Mundle.

Channel programs that don’t focus on creating scalable, repeatable and predictable process are also likely to be ignored by partners, adds Mundle.

That approach to the channel is more critical than ever at a time when many IT organizations are now looking to extend their data protection processes to the cloud. The challenge many of them have today is accomplishing that goal without necessarily having to compromise on the recovery time or point objectives. To meet those requirements, Mundle says Veeam is advocating a hybrid approach the combines appliances running in a local data center with instances of Veeam software running in the cloud.

It’s clear that data protection vendors are starting to pull out all the stops as part of an effort to maintain partner loyalty as competition becomes more intense. Vendors might not always fully appreciate having to make that additional level of investment in the channel. But the fact is most of them wouldn’t make those investments in the first place if they didn’t already know the return on those investments will be several orders of magnitude greater than what it may have cost to provide those additional benefits.