Veeam's European channel boss opens up on expansion plans

Daniel Fried talks plans for Veeam's massive investment earlier this year

Veeam is planning to use its massive $500m (£389.5m) investment to expand into China, Japan and Latin America, according to channel boss Daniel Fried.

The Switzerland-based vendor received the mammoth investment at the start of 2019 and Fried was coy about what exactly it will be spent on, but emphasised that geographic expansion outside EMEA is a priority.

"We are expanding into East Asia, particularly China and Japan, and Latin America," he disclosed to CRN.

"In EMEA we are already in the number one position, which is pretty good. What we do in EMEA is much more penetrating, much deeper to large customers and our service providers.

"Announcements are going to come about how this money is being used. One of the things that is definitely key is investment into much more R&D resources that we are developing in the Czech Republic."

The UK is home to Veeam's largest channel operation, which is partly due to the number of large partners with wide-ranging offerings requiring more support than their European counterparts, according to Fried.

"The UK is one of the countries where we have the most channel people, more than we have in other countries," he said.

"There are some larger partners in the UK and they have very large portfolios of product from different vendors and they cannot be knowledgeable about everything.

"That is why they need much more support from the vendors than what I see in other European countries, where partners are maybe a little bit smaller and focus more of their activities on a limited number of customers."

Fried added that Veeam has always been a partner-friendly company and as new entrants come into the backup and recovery and data management space, he believes in the loyalty of its channel relationships.

"I like relationships and our ecosystem is all about partnerships so right now this is number one for us and I think we are very good at that," he stated.

"A lot of these new competitors can even try things like giving much more margin to the partners, much more money to them, yet partners remain pretty loyal to Veeam.

"[How we retain this loyalty] is with three key elements: our robustness, the ease of use and the flexibility to be able to adapt to any kind of environment."