INTERVIEW technologyreseller.co.uk 19 levels of partner – Platinum, including six in the UK; Gold; Silver; and Registered – and two distributors (Arrow and TD SYNNEX) that bring in and manage the partner community on behalf of Veritas. “Our ecosystem is growing on two fronts. One is around the technology partnerships we have with the likes of Microsoft, CrowdStrike and others in the 360 Defense area; the other is through distribution. That’s the source of lots of new partners that are coming through, some of which have been born in the cloud and have more of a security perspective than a storage-type background. That’s a trend that we’re seeing and it’s quite likely that within the next few years one of those partners will become a Platinum partner.” Perhaps because of this, Norman adds that Veritas is also doing more business through marketplaces, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google. “The whole marketplace way of transacting, for customers to be able to draw down on their commitments to cloud service providers and for those organisations to be able to transact those private offers quickly, is becoming much more prevalent. At Veritas, we don’t have any preference. We just need to make sure it’s easy for customers and that it’s integrated into how partners get incentivised and rewarded, so all the incentives we provide to our partners are achievable through marketplaces and two-tier distribution.” Broader customer base He adds that over the last three years the distributor-led partner community has enabled Veritas to extend its customer base from its sweet spot in the enterprise space to more mid-market organisations propelled by incentives for net new logos and the success of products like Backup Executive, which backs up the Microsoft suite in the cloud. In addition, Veritas also has longstanding relationships with global system integrators like Fujitsu and Kyndryl. “With workloads moving to the cloud, workloads coming back from the cloud, customers adopting a one-in, one-out approach in terms of the vendors they work with, because of the amount of technologies they need to work together, quickly. The third thing is being really strategic in the way we impact cost across an organisation. For example, our NetBackup software allows us to dedupe data, so customers aren’t storing data that’s not needed. Customers look at that total cost of ownership, not just for what they’re buying from Veritas, but for their whole ecosystem and spend within other areas that might get impacted.” In this context, Norman says organisations are looking much more closely at which workloads to put in the cloud and which to bring back to a private data centre. “The other thing we’re seeing is data sovereignty becoming a big thing, particularly in Europe. Government organisations want to keep data on French soil or German soil and for it to be managed by resident companies. That’s a great opportunity for partners who are providing managed services and an area where we see lots of growth and opportunity.” Norman adds that the size of the market opportunity for partners is reflected in their growing participation in enablement training. “If you go back a few years, it was always a challenge to get partners certified, but today the doors have been knocked off with partners wanting to get the latest skill sets and capabilities in this space. One reason is the launch of Alta, which has a brand-new set of capabilities; the other is simply growing demand from customers.” Partner programme Norman, who joined Veritas in April last year, says one of the things he likes most about the company’s partner programme is that it links directly to the company’s overarching priorities, which are cloud, net new logos and more segment four and five customers. These are businesses that partners deal with directly without any involvement from enterprise sales representatives within Veritas. “If those customers become really successful, then we will promote them up through our customer tiering – we have customer tiering and we have partner tiering.” On the partner side, Veritas has four there’s a huge opportunity for the big SIs to make sure companies are getting value for money and that they’re getting interoperability across all systems. We’re seeing growth both in that mid-market, being supported by resellers, and among bigger, more complex organisations that require a multinational approach to consolidate and bring together all their systems.” In the meantime, Veritas will continue to develop its product offering and enhance its partner programme to ensure it maintains the right balance between change and continuity. “We need stability in the way we work together because, with the investment partners make in us and the way they like to work with us, there has to be some level of continuity. You can’t flip from one year to the next,” says Norman. No doubt, that will apply post-merger as well, given Cohesity’s long-term commitment to the Veritas product roadmap and the value it places on the company’s extensive partner ecosystem. Watch this space for more details in the coming months. Oliver Norman
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