CHANNEL OUTLOOK 2018
This year Veeam enhanced its Veeam Cloud Service Provider programme to allow such partners to differentiate themselves in the Cloud marketplace. The company also introduced a new Veeam Accredited Service Partner programme that enables its members to deliver high-quality professional services related to Veeam solutions. This helps customers realise increased reliability, along with greater value and return of investment of their investments in Veeam. Veeam will also be making improvements for key Platinum and Gold partners shortly, around rebates and VMCE training.
Scorecard
Last year was a big year for Veeam and the vendor brought new opportunities to the market. Veeam delivered agents for physical servers and also end points, which dramatically increases Veeam’s addressable market. Veeam also announced Version 10 with new announcements and features, support for Nutanix, IBM storage and NAS, plus a joint venture to extend software to IBM AIX and Solaris UNIX servers. Veeam Console was significantly improved very recently to allow customers to manage physical and virtual environments through one pane of glass. Veeam also signed reseller agreements with HPE, Cisco and NetApp so partners of these three major vendors can sell Veeam together as a complete solution.
Growth
Availability remains the key driving force. Most organisations want to have their information available to customers and employees 24x7x365. Veeam also sees cloud adoption about to take off in this region. Every Veeam customer with an on-premise solution will be able to use cloud services from Microsoft and Amazon as well as other local cloud providers. The only real issue has been cash flow and budgets. However, the outlook for next year appears to be bright in key markets such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.
Forecast
2018 will see more focus on cloud and software especially security and those partners who invest in services.