Veeam Software is signalling a wave of change, and a sense of aggression in the company, in its annual flagship event VeeamON. Held for the first time in 2014 with around 1200 delegates, the platform has now grown to 3000 attendees in 2017. Not really comparable to some of tech giants out there but definitely not bad for a nine-year old company.
VeeamON is on in full strength in New Orleans where the company's top management spoke to its partners, press and analysts on the availability positioning that it is building the brand on.
Simply put, availability means that the experience for a 5-year old watching content from the cloud should be as seamless as it is for a company CEO looking for information to a company's business itself. Downtime means a cost on revenue and reputation and Veeam's positioning is to address this.
Unlike some of its peer, Veeam does not provide these services but works with a partner ecosystem to make availability a reality. The thrust for the company hence has to be to keep strengthening this ecosystem. On the first day, Veeam made a slew of announcements to that effect.
Expanding revenue opportunities for partners was the keyword in that. As per a Veeam research, 69 percent of enterprises feel that availability is a requirement for digital transformation. For the always on cloud, Veeam has added new offerings and programs, designed and priced for a service delivery model. These include and support migrating, managing and protecting public cloud (AWS, Microsoft Azure and other) workloads, physical servers and endpoints with new Veeam Availability Console and Veeam Agents.
A new Veeam CDP and vCloud Director Integration for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) capabilities was also introduced for protecting enterprise mission critical applications.
Tape as a Service to help customers meet compliance requirements for archival and retention; Microsoft Office 365 with new multi-tenancy, multi-repository and automation capabilities in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365; a new Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Directory to connect VARs and VCSPs and to increase professional services revenue and customer satisfaction with the new Veeam Accredited Service Provider program was also announced.
"Veeam is dedicated to enabling its ecosystem of ProPartners and Veeam Cloud and Service Provider partners (VCSPs) to help customers move and manage data in a Multi-Cloud environment. At VeeamON 2017, we are announcing a slew of new offerings and programs that will drive even greater partner services revenue and engagement," said Peter McKay, co-CEO and President at Veeam.
Veeam's partners, who were present at the forum, also appear to be taking in all the new developments positively. "With today's announcement, Veeam once again proves itself a committed partner and industry leader in achieving ultimate Availability for our clients," said Mark Mercado, Vice President of Channel Sales at SingleHop. "Cloud computing offers incredible opportunities in the backup and recovery space, but success requires the right technology and a keen understanding of customer needs. Veeam gets it -- their unerring capacity for innovation and willingness to collaborate with our product, sales and marketing teams make them the ideal partner."
"Today's announcement reaffirms Veeam's commitment to its partners. We value our relationship with Veeam and look forward to our customers benefiting from these expanded offerings," added Tom Cahill, vice president, product and partner management, CDW.
