Veeam ushers the next wave of enterprise innovation in India

Veeam recently hosted the Indian edition of its biggest annual conference, VeeamON Forum. VeeamON Forum focuses on connecting renowned IT experts and visionaries to explore non-stop business continuity, digital transformational agility and visibility for any data, any app on any cloud. It is the learning platformfor Hyper-Availability, a new state of intelligence, where data delivers actionable insights to allow businesses to increase productivity and innovate faster to offer new digital services that improve how we live and work.

On the side-lines of the event, VARINDIA caught up with Dean Cunningham, Senior Director, Alliances & Channel Strategy (Asia Pacific & Japan) – Veeamand one of Veeam’s coveted partners, Anuj Gupta, CEO, Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic to understand how the company is looking at India from a business perspective -

‘We had to invest in India in order to meet our growth objectives’

Dean Cunningham
Senior Director, Alliances & Channel Strategy (Asia Pacific & Japan) – Veeam

“From Veeam perspective, globally we have 12 cross alliances and it is quite amazing to have quite a variety of partners. The top 3 for us are – HP, Cisco, and NetApp. HP is the longest standing reseller that we have had and had been partnered with us for 18 months. Cisco has been our resell partner for us for 12 months. We have been getting some really great engagements with HP on the enterprise space, also with Cisco we had made some recent announcements on their Hyperflex platform. We are Cisco’s ISV Partner of the Year and have had strong market success winning together, and now we are collaborating on this new solution to meet customer demand for even more innovative ways to modernize their datacenters. We are also inking new relationships with organizations like Huawei, Lenovo with whom we are going to have a reseller agreement. So there is a lot coming in to drive the business. Veeam started as an SMB business, and we are now slowly evolving into the enterprise space. 

When we look at our alliances on a global level, we see how our alliance partners complement us and allow us to get into those spaces where we are not present today. What we are also finding is that a lot of alliance partners are coming and seeking us to have an active relationship with them.  So we try to complement them in what they do. So in some cases it is them who come to us saying that they would like to partner with us because we happen to have those solutions which they don’t have it with them. But in most cases, we identify those partners where we think we are the best fit and we get into those relationships. 
If I look at India, we came here in 2011. We have made some structural changes to the business internally. Veeam moved the reporting lines from MEA to APJ. When I talk about investments, Veeam has expectations to get to $2 billion by end of this year and $2.2 billion by 2022. And for that to happen, we needed to invest in markets like India. India happens to be our greatest growth engine, we are investing actively. So today we have got a manpower of 21 people in India and a channel team of 5.   We are also planning to bring in insight sales team, thus taking the number to 30 people by the end of this year. So that is a continued investment for us. We have got 700 partners here in India, besides the active alliances with vendors. If I look from a region perspective, we have got 65% growth number.”