Oliver Norman, Veritas

Oliver Norman is vice president, international channel and alliances EMEAI at Veritas. Oliver is responsible for the development and execution of a growth-oriented channel strategy that will expands Veritas leading position in business and cloud resiliency.

Reporting directly to Mike Walkey, [Senior Vice President, Global Channel and Alliances], Oliver is also critical part of Mark Nutt's, [Senior Vice President International Sales (EMEA +APJ)] regional leadership Team.

As a proven technology leader with decades of international sales experience, immediately prior to Veritas Oliver served as Area Vice President for BMC Software â€" which helps customers run and reinvent their businesses with open, scalable, and modular solutions to complex IT problems where he also led the channel sales function for EMEA. He also worked at Morse, a consulting, IT services and technology company, with proven expertise in business applications services and infrastructure services and technology.

Number of years in current role:

1

Number of years in current company:

1

Number of years involved in indirect sales:

10

Reporting to:

Mike Walkey, SVP, global channels

What percentage of your sales come through the channel?

95 per cent

Describe your personal channel philosophy.

Our Veritas partners play a pivotal role in amplifying our combined strengths and expanding the horizons of possibilities. Our partners are able to reach a wide range of customers, understand their business challenges, and help us position our capabilities to drive successful customer outcomes. We need to ensure they are an extension of our organization, with the same level of enablement and ramped up for success.

At the heart of it all lies a collective passion for creating innovation and tackling challenges head-on, ensuring that when we succeed, we do it together as one team

What were your biggest channel accomplishments over the past year?

I supported our partners on their transition to a subscription model, heavily involved in the creation and roll-out across EMEA of our new Managed Services Partner programme. Innovating and modernising our route to market has delivered mutual success, with Veritas partners fully embracing the Veritas multi-cloud strategy and solutions.

What were your organisation's biggest channel accomplishments over the past year?

Veritas kicked off its FY24 with substantial updates to the Veritas Partner Force programme. The updates are aimed at enabling our partners to accelerate their transition to the cloud with enhanced rewards for cloud-based deals and a simplified transaction process, as well as new training and accreditation. Another key accomplishment was the launch of our managed service provider programme.

This purpose-built programme offers MSPs a set of incentives, a wide range of training and enablement, and flexible pricing models to expand their offerings and capitalise on the growing demand for data protection and cloud-native cyber resilience solutions. We additionally crossed a key milestone in our strategic alliance with Kyndryl, unveiling two new joint services to help enterprises protect and recover their critical data across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

How is your organisation's market development strategy (MDF) changing this year?

Veritas prioritises investing in MDF in customer demand generation and partner enablement activities, which will continue in 2024. This shared pool of funds is available for eligible partners to support Veritas business and marketing activities empowering growth in our mutual business.

What are your top channel goals for 2024?

Improve partner technical skills.

Improve partner profitability.

Increase the amount of recurring revenue going through partners.

What were the key partner investments made over the past year?

Veritas has made several recent investments in the channel. Among these are incentives for partners to leverage Veritas Alta sales to take advantage of the growing cloud market. This includes new training and accreditation, as well as rewards, and work with partners on demand generation activities to attract net new customers. Veritas will also support and reward channel partners that help existing customers realize additional benefits from their Veritas solutions by extending their use of the Veritas platform to new workloads and use cases. In addition to these areas, we deepened our investment in MSPs and engagements with GSIs.