Veeam partners looking for earlier input on product development

Veeam's channel partners are seeking earlier involvement in product development, telling the backup and disaster recovery vendor that it will help them better serve the market

At the VeeamOn 2022 conference in Las Vegas, Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam spoke to CRN to discuss the current relationship between the backup and disaster recovery vendor and its channel partners.

When asked about feedback from partners, Eswaran said they want to be involved earlier in the product strategy.

“The only opportunity for doing something better, which I hear from them is ‘get us involved even earlier, into your product strategy so we can be ready for our customers. That's about the only thing which comes up every now and then,” he said.

Eswaran said that historically, companies could box channel partners in and be able to label them as one entity such as a distributor, GSI or MSP but those worlds are colliding.

“Resellers are resuming some professional services capabilities to add more value to their customers. One of the key things we're looking at is making sure we can meet our partners where they are, and enable them to create that value for their customers and work across a much bigger variety of partners as well,” he explained.

“The focus historically has been on wires, resellers, cloud service providers, some ISPs, but we want to significantly amplify that. Bringing GSI and bringing MSPs, work deeper with the hyperscalers and work deeper with the primary and secondary storage companies and the ISPs.

“This is a partner first company and it will continue to remain,” he added.

Matthew Bishop, COO at Veeam said the company gives channel partners a more open way for them to buy.

“One thing we're seeing that is changing in the partner landscape, there is a much more open way of getting buy-in if they say, if they say I want to buy a service, we have a solution for that as well as what people have traditionally done for many years, which is thinking about on on-prem as their first port of call,” he said.

Athina Mallis travelled to VeeamON as a guest of Veeam.