It’s been a year since Jeff Goldstein left NetApp Canada, after a close to 15 years at the helm, to run Veeam Canada.
After a year on the job, Goldstein told CDN that his Canadian strategy for the backup, disaster recovery and virtualization management software vendor will be based on three pillars: Growth, Technology and People.
The privately-held Veeam is run as if it were a public company and are open to sharing results, Goldstein said. Currently Veeam has 28 per cent worldwide growth and has revenues of approximately $607 million. More importantly for Goldstein is that high profile organizations are using Veeam solutions. He said 74 per cent of the Fortune 500 are Veeam customers and more than 56 per cent of the Global 2000 have some kind of Veeam product installed.
Key to Goldstein’s growth strategy is to focus on attracting new enterprise customers in Canada. The overall enterprise segment for Veeam grew 49 per cent from last year and that accounted for more than 4,000 new customers. While Goldstein realizes the Canadian market is made up mostly of SMB customers, the pursuit of the enterprise, he believes, is in line with the company’s strategy to address the unprotected VMs in the world.
Veeam also introduced a cloud service provider program that also targets the enterprise space. Goldstein added, there are several customers in the enterprise who want to extend their on-premises solutions to the cloud. That can lead to new market opportunities for cloud repositories to be backed-up off-site as the demand for cloud grows. The same goes for VMs on the cloud. Veeam has launched a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering for this. Other products for this effort from Veeam are Cloud Connect Backup and Cloud Connect Replication.
The channel plan for Veeam in Canada will stick to aligning with vendor alliance partners such as Microsoft, NetApp, Dell EMC, Cisco and Nimble Storage. (Nimble Storage was acquired by HPE just after CDN interviewed Goldstein for this story: ED)
However, HPE is also part of the alliance channel plan for Veeam. Goldstein said HPE are now taking Veeam SKUs and rebranding them as an HPE sku for its storage group. Under this scenario, HPE channel partners can sell these solutions and get credit inside the HPE program and the Veeam ProPartner program.
Also for 2017, Goldstein plans to focus on developing a group of corporate resellers for Veeam through partnerships with Softchoice, SHI Canada, PCM/Acrodex and CDW Canada.
To support that, Goldstein has tasked his channel team to also work with national solution providers such as Long View Systems, Pivot/Teramach, Scaler, SoftwareOne and Compugen.
“We need to be more intensive and deliberate with this group so that we can get wider and deeper in the channel,” he added.
In total, Veeam has 500 channel partners in Canada.