Veeam's new channel boss hails mid-market push

Mark Johnson insists SMB still important, but says mid-market is 'huge' for channel

Veeam's new channel boss has said its partners are poised to cash in on a "huge, huge opportunity" as the company makes moves towards the mid-market.

Mark Johnson joined Veeam in May as its UK and Ireland channel director. He came from CommVault, where he held the same title for two and a half years.

Speaking about his new job for the first time, Johnson told CRN Veeam has traditionally been seen as a vendor focused on the SMB space, but that this is changing.

"I have been talking to some significant new partners we are bringing on in the UK," he said. "I think Veeam has perhaps been perceived as SMB [in the past], but Veeam is not SMB – we are moving very rapidly into the mid-market and this is a huge, huge opportunity for partners."

Veeam's revenue bookings rose 64 per cent annually in Q2 2015, spurred on by enterprise customers. According to the vendor, about 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies and 48 per cent of the Global 2,000 use its services.

But Johnson insisted that the push to secure larger customers will not come at the expense of its SMB base. He said the firm will carry on building on the SMB market, and that targeting small customers, along with the mid-market and enterprises, will help Veeam on its path to a $1bn (£680m) turnover by 2018.

Veeam unveiled a new partner programme in March, which it said offered additional resources and tools for enterprise partners including an invitation-only training scheme.

Johnson went on to say that throughout the past six months he has been "constantly tweaking" the programme based on feedback from partners

"We recently had a meeting with our Partner Advisory Group, which is all part of our process of viewing what we are doing to make our partners more successful," he said.

"We make tweaks to our partner programme annually. But right now that partner programme is really quite robust, in that it allows partners to go out there and create opportunities to be successful and profitable."