Veeam ensures Availability to enable Always-On business for its customers 

Gone are the days where the brick and mortar companies used to just write on paper about the sales they have done, comeback and give it to the accounts team, who on its part will create an invoice and give it back. Today’s digital environment demands organizations to make data and applications available 24.7.365. This leaves enterprise with no room for any downtime or loss of critical data. Thus setting this context, Ashok Acharya, Regional Director, India and SAARC - Veeam gives an exclusive interview to VARINDIA while also speaking about the company’s roadmap for the India market - 

Veeam is a 10 year old start-up with headquarters in Switzerland and having presence in more than 67 countries. It has more than 2, 45, 000 customers worldwide with a strong presence in India. In India it has about 750+ customers with 100+ active partners in its channel eco-system. 

“We are the fastest growing company in the world with revenues of 720 million dollars worldwide, which will be reaching 2K million dollars by 2019,” asserts Ashok.

Veeam does not sell directly and it is always through the channel ecosystem. It works very closely hand-on-hand with ISV or alliance partners. Partners like HP Enterprise, Cisco, Microsoft and NetApp form part of this partnership.

The Veeam channel eco-system is also segregated into tier 1, tier2 and tier3 types that serve customers across all verticals. In tier 1 category, Veeam has global SI’s like IBM, Accenture and in tier2 partner category, the company has partnership with Indian SI’s with global presence like Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra and HCL. 

Veeam also works with the reseller community that is the tier 3 partners. The reseller is typically regional specific and they don’t have a national presence, but they are strong in each region and so Veeam works very closely with these regional partners. 

“As part of the go – to - market strategy, whenever there is a datacenter opportunity, our ISV partners incorporate Veeam and send it to the customers. Just to give you an example- HP Enterprise has got Veeam price list. When a HPE sales person sells Veeam, he gets rewarded too. Likewise, we also work very closely with the CiscoUCS team; so whenever Cisco uses our opportunity, then by default the back-up is always from Veeam,” explains Ashok.

Veeam also categorises its business as SMB, commercial and enterprise; any deal value less than $10k is categorised as SMB, which is primarily run by the channel. Then there are deals worth $10k to less than $50k that is categorises undercommercial business. “To run the commercial business we have two territory managers (TM) in each regionto cater to specific verticals.So One TM would be taking care for Banking, finance and IT and the other one will be taking care of manufacturing and services verticals in India. These territory managers will work with the tier 1 partners and the global SIs and approach the customers for opportunities,” explains Ashok.

Veeam works with two distributors in India –Tech Data and Redington. 

Opportunities in India...
With 750 customers, Veeam has just covered 5% of the market in India, so there is huge growth opportunity for the company. “We have not gone deeper into large enterprise customers and so hiring enterprise account managersin India to focus on such deals,” says Ashok. “We will identify the top 20 accounts in each vertical and as a strategy these enterprise account managers will have a dedicated sales engineer, who will go in the accounts sales directly.”

The key focussed verticals for Veeam is IT & ITeS, manufacturing, banking and Defence. “With digital transformation, Indian organizations have no scope for an IT outage, unavailability of data or web downtime. Since everyone wants to secure their back-up, they would require Veeam to enable Always-On business. Again data needs to bebacked-upsecurely, so that it is readily available whenever you want it. That is where Veeam comes into play,” explains Ashok. 

Roadmap for Veeam India...
Ashok wants to see Veeam growing as the no.1 vendor in the data availability space. “We always ensure the SLAs that we cover with customers are the best. Veeam has got the maximum support ratings worldwide; we get 72% rating on support and we have a success rate of 85 % ofour customer renew license. This is because our engagement with customer has to be of very high experience,” says Ashok.

In India Veeam keeps getting repeat business from its top enterprise customers. The business of Veeam from Q1, 2016 to Q1,2017 grew by 34% and in Q2 it grew by 43 %. But Ashok’s vision is to make this growth 100% by next year.