Veeam Says Its Flexible Approach To Data Protection Empowers Partners

The disaster recovery and backup vendor is encouraging its burgeoning channel to seize the opportunity to offer services around coming integrations with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Nutanix and other storage solutions, the company says at The Channel Company’s NexGen Cloud conference.

Veeam is looking to seize the momentum of a rapidly expanding backup and disaster recovery market by allowing partners unprecedented flexibility when building data protection solutions for diverse customer environments.

Brad Craig, Veeam Cloud & Service Provider territory manager, told attendees of The Channel Company’s NexGen Cloud conference in Anaheim, Calif. that backup and disaster recovery is a market that will only accelerate as "resellers are changing from reselling hardware to creating services practices."

Veeam, which targets the SMB market, is the fastest growing backup product in its scope and size, with 3,700 customers worldwide and growing fast, Craig said.

The company headquartered in Switzerland reached a $1 billion booking milestone earlier this year and is still growing 16 percent annually as it's "working with partners to go to that cloud service provider model."

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"We've made it stupid simple for our partners to grow," Craig said. "There's a huge addressable market for you guys to go after."

Three-quarters of enterprise customers use a form of cloud backup already, he said, adding, "they don’t want to do it themselves, they want to do it as a service."

Veeam provides the technology to enable MSPs to offer that service across an expanding set of storage environments.

And while some aspects of the offsite backup market have become commoditized, "it is something inherently needed with all your customers," he said.

The opportunity is especially unique for Microsoft SaaS practices, as Office 365 isn't fully protected by Microsoft.

"You need to educate customers on that," Craig said. "Office 365 is growing, and you can easily offer it as a service, and I recommend you research that for growing your revenue."

Veeam has shied away selling backup appliances, instead looking to support Backup and Disaster Recovery in multiple ways and flavors.

"We open our APIs to allow any storage vendor to write to us," he said. And the company, which initially focused on VMware environments, will go further down the integration path as it builds new capabilities.

Veeam is building deeply integrated backup solutions for Microsoft Azure, AWS and independent vendors like Wasabi. It will soon better support object storage as well, he said.

Microsoft is letting Veeam "peak under the covers" of its Hyper-V hypervisor to better support Azure as the data protection vendor prepares to launch Veeam Cloud Backup for Microsoft Azure. It's also differentiating its product by integrating with Nutanix appliances.

"We have the ability to be flexible in any way you want to provide service to your customer," Craig said.

John Stewart, Veeam's director for partner sales, briefly joined Craig on stage to elucidate the reseller model.

"We have a really robust partner program," Stewart told solution providers attending the session. "We're here to help you make money."

Marguerite Chan, chief experience officer at Integrative IT, a Veeam partner based in Boulder, Colo., said her company uses Veeam for Office 365 backup, but would like to see G Suite added to that portfolio.

Chan came to NexGen partly to advance the relationship with Veeam, and to better understand its roadmap for product development.

Selling backup still isn't as easy as many would imagine, Chan told CRN. "I don't think they realize they need it," she said of many customers.

To get around that hesitance, she often asks an arresting question: "would it matter if your business couldn't operate?"

While she'd like to see the vendor expand backup and disaster recovery capabilities to Google's office productivity suite, she told CRN, "Veeam has been good for us because it's a good price point for the clients that don’t yet understand they need it."