Veeam to give away $200m of cloud backup services through partners

Veeam set to target 'tired' enterprise customers in 2017

Backup and disaster recovery (DR) vendor Veeam has announced plans to give away $200m (£160.4m) in free cloud backup and DR-as-a-service as it looks to boost its presence in the enterprise space.

Veeam will make up to $1,000 available to every customer using Veeam for on-premise backup and DR, which can be claimed through any Veeam service provider.

Richard Agnew, vice president for north-west EMEA at Veaam, said he hopes the offer will encourage Veeam's end users to move more workloads to the cloud.

"This will both drive [customers] into cloud environments, but also encourage our partner community to enable Veeam services [on] their side, so that they can connect to this huge range of Veaam customers which is unique in the market," he said.

Agnew claimed that Veeam has a customer base of around 230,000 globally and is taking on about 4,000 new customers a month.

"It's a big base to go at and it's very attractive to our cloud service provider companies so we're effectively seeding the market," he added.

"It shows how seriously we are taking the cloud market and what a big market it is for us. It grew at 80 per cent for us [in revenue] last year and this is the way the market is going."

Targeting the enterprise

Commvault CCO Bill Wohl recently claimed that organisations in the enterprise space were starting to get "Veeam fatigue" because of Veeam's inability to scale and operate across different physical and cloud environments.

Agnew disputed this comment, pointing to Veeam's growth in the enterprise space and the introduction of its physical backup and DR solutions as proof of Veeam's enterprise success.

He said that while Veeam saw revenue growth of 28 per cent in 2016, with bookings up to $607.4m, sales in its enterprise unit were up 180 per cent.

With this in mind, Agnew said that Veeam is looking to recruit enterprise-focused partners to continue to expand the business.

"We're actively recruiting partners," he said. "We have a focus on enterprise partners as well so we're doing a lot of work to grow our relationship with our platinum partners - those that have the better touch into the enterprise space.

"Our success in the enterprise space in the UK, with such growth last year, is testament to our relationships with the enterprise partners."

Tired customers

Agnew said that the key reason for customers looking to switch their backup and DR solutions to Veeam from a legacy vendor is the desire for a simpler solution.

Referring to two recent articles published in CRN, where emerging DR vendor Rubrik traded insults with legacy player Commvault, Agnew claimed that enterprise customers are becoming fed up with having to employ teams of people to keep their backup infrastructure running.

"We're definitely displacing our legacy rivals in that space and you can probably guess the ones that we come across on a more regular basis are some of the ones that are having a bit of a spat in your articles," he said.

"I think most people in the channel are pretty savvy and they understand the products. One of the challenges of today is around complexity. People want rid of the complexity and I think the customers and the channel are getting tired of it.

"People want a simple solution that they can get up and running very quickly that works without having to pour professional services and teams and teams of people [into it] to get it up and running.

"When we speak to customers, particularly enterprise customers, that's the bit that frustrates them."