Channel Daily News

Virtualization backup vendor revamps channel program

Columbus, Ohio-based Veeam Software is in channel investment mode after it announced major additions to its ProPartner program for Canada and the U.S.

The backup, replication and virtualization management vendor for VMware vSphere and Windows Server Hyper-V will be offering solution providers additional margin and incentive opportunities as well as free technical and sales training.

Veeam’s vice president of North American sales, Bill Botti, who ran the Alternative Technology Group for Arrow ECS, said the goal of the enhance ProPartner program is to invest in the channel partners who are willing to invest their time and energy in Veem for mutual benefit.

“As a 100 per cent channel-driven company that never sells directly to end users, we recognize that our partners are critical to our success and continued growth. We’ve made our program significantly more meaningful and attractive. As a 30-year channel veteran both as a reseller and a distributor, I have a unique understanding of how the reseller model works and have worked to craft a program that creates a true valued partnership with our channel – one we can both profit from by committing to each other,” Botti said.

The main benefit of the new ProPartner program is the increased margins based on tier levels achieved by the partner. There will also be additional profitability through Veeam’s deal registration program.

Training gets cheaper with the ProPartner program. Solution Providers who sign up to ProPartner will get technical and sales enablement training for free. This includes accreditations through Veeam University.

The new ProPartner program will also have joint marketing support. Under the new program, Veeam channel executives will begin to work with top channel partners on joint marketing activities including email campaigns, webinars, and other demand-generation events.

Veeam also announced new restore capabilities for Veeam Backup & Replication. Developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots enables IT administrators to recover virtual machines (VM) and their data directly from HP LeftHand and HP StoreVirtual VSA snapshots. According to Veeam, this new capability enables admins to restore any or all of a VM directly from SAN snapshots, which can be taken throughout the day preventing major impact on production systems. This enables short recovery point objectives (RPOs) for the most common recovery scenarios: users accidentally deleting data, scripts accidentally corrupting data and system updates gone wrong. Veeam president and CEO Ratmir Timashev said the company worked with HP to develop Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots. Veeam’s revolutionary capability enables customers to recover quickly from daily disasters using SAN snapshots they already have in place without additional cost.

Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots will be demonstrated later this week at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. General in Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5, which is scheduled for release in Q4 2012. The feature will be free and included in all editions of Veeam Backup & Replication, including Veeam Backup Free Edition.