Gary Sievers, Veritas

Gary Sievers is vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, channel sales & alliances at Veritas Technology. In his role, Gary is responsible for leading the overall APJ channel strategy, growing the company's ecosystem of partners and helping them to deliver even greater value to their customers.

An industry veteran with over 30 years of experience, Gary has held numerous leadership roles across the Asia Pacific and Europe regions. He is highly experienced in developing programs and transformative strategies to drive growth across the channel organisations, and has a strong track record in leading high-performing teams. Gary is a partner and customer-centric leader, with the ability to empower his teams to initiate change, drive profitability and meet the objectives of partners and customers - all while addressing the needs of the evolving IT market landscape.

He has a proven record of driving growth when leading channel and alliances organizations. Prior to joining Veritas, Gary was at Dell where he was the Channel Director for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. He successfully established a network of new strategic partnerships to achieve significant market gains across the region. Gary's in-depth understanding of the local business cultures and deep expertise in cultivating extensive customer and partner networks have resulted in successive revenue growth for the respective organisations.

Number of years in current role:

5

Number of years in current company:

5

Number of years involved in indirect sales:

34

Reporting to:

Mike Walkey, SVP, Global channel sales & alliances

Percentage of sales generated through the channel:

96 per cent.

Describe your personal channel philosophy.

My channel is an extension of our own Veritas salesforce, where the value of partnerships is greater than the sum of individual parts. Our channel strategy focuses on ensuring that our value proposition is relevant and resonates with our channel partners. To me, the fundamentals of the channel business are profitability, ease of doing business, and consistent demand and opportunities creation to ensure sustainable long-term partnerships. Successful channel programs are long-term relationships with channel partners built on trust and clearly defined mutual benefit.

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

I aided partners in transitioning to a subscription model, achieving significant progress. Success resulted from partners embracing Veritas' multi-cloud strategy. Here we prioritised partner-sourced revenue, enhancing profitability through opportunity registration rebate, and certifications. I focused on creating a positive work environment where employees feel valued, recognised, and celebrated.

Veritas kicked off our financial year with substantial updates to the Veritas Partner Force Programme, 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 (MSP) 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 achieved high growth on our partners' sourced opportunities (ORR), and our Distribution Channel drove significant value with Veritas non-managed partners.

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

At Veritas, we prioritise investing in MDF in customer demand generation and partner enablement activities, which we will continue in 2024. This shared pool of funds is available for eligible partners to support Veritas business to empower growth in our mutual business. We will continue with plan-based development fund to support partners in activities like marketing, demand generation and awareness-building campaigns, as well as enablement. The investment program of this partner-led development funds aligns closely to channel GTM strategy which encapsulate around Cloud, MSP, and Strategic Alliances.