Veeam Channel Chief: Shift from Perpetual Licenses to Subscriptions Going Strong
… professional services. It’s just when it comes down to it, are they going to host it in their own environment? And some of our partners, while they have seen massive amounts of their money coming from services, in other cases they think, “You know what, somebody’s already gone out and built that, and they’re doing it better than we could — and probably less expensively than us trying to start from scratch. Why don’t we just partner with them and leverage what they have?”
CF: Veeam Backup for Office 365 protection services has been such a huge hit for Veeam. How are you working with the Microsoft partner ecosystem? Presumably, a large portion of Veeam partners are also Microsoft partners. What kind of mobilization have you done?
KR: It’s a $150 million business for us today. We back up millions of mailboxes, but there are tens of millions still out there that aren’t backed up. So, it’s still with all of the great announcements including version 11, Kasten and going after the container world, the single biggest opportunity for further growth for us is Office 365. And yes, we are going deep and wide with the partners that have really strong Microsoft practices, and we’re getting a willingness because of the strong relationship that Veeam actually has with Microsoft.
CF: How have Microsoft and Veeam positioned this in terms of how partners should be attaching this as an added offering?
KR: Every time an Office 365 product is sold, it should be sold along with Veeam’s backup. There’s an education process that goes on where it’s made clear to the customers: that this is not inherently backed up, and that ultimately the customer has the responsibility for the security and retention of that data. And that’s what Veeam can provide. It’s a huge opportunity. It will continue to be its fastest-growing, and we’re just scratching the surface.
CF: Switching gears to Kasten, protecting Kubernetes workloads is obviously a whole different area. Are any of your existing partners in this space? Or do you need find new partners that are in that ecosystem?
KR: Interestingly, we just went through this exercise. There is a subset of our partners that have built practices and services on Kubernetes. They are already doing this business today. We have a pyramid approach; we’re going to the folks that have the practices today that are heavily engaged in that community. It’s definitely a strong entry point for us into commercial enterprise accounts. That business is a disrupter and will continue to be over the next couple of years as backup and recovery for containers is going to become a prerequisite.
CF: What are the next steps in terms of enablement that are on your agenda?
KR: Well, our priorities, the first and foremost is Office 365. It’s the low-hanging fruit. We’ve got our teams focused heavily on that. But also, a hot priority is making this transition from perpetual to subscription. All of our partners are going back out and looking at their existing Veeam customer base, and making that migration, sales pitch. And it’s working extremely well.