Exclusive: New Kiwi team, new training as Veeam ramps up local investment

Veeam is increasing its investment in New Zealand as the company goes from strength to strength locally.

Don Williams, Veeam Software Australia and New Zealand vice president, says the company's first every in-country New Zealand field marketing manager, based in New Zealand, will be on board in late March or early April.

The appointment is one of several initiatives Veeam has to deepen its relationship with local resellers and reach aggressive targets locally.

Last year the company clocked 20% year on year growth across ANZ – a feat Williams isn't entirely happy with.

"We always have very aggressive targets, but for me, I think we could have gone better," he says.

However, he notes the targets are based on US dollars and the Australian and New Zealand markets were heavily impacted by the exchange rate.

"If you factor that out [growth] was definitely in the high 30% range, probably around 38% or 39% on local currency," he says.

"We're expecting 2016 to be higher year on year growth in terms of US dollars, so on par with what we did last year in local currency.

The new Kiwi field marketing manager will be working closely with partners to help drive leads for the channel and build joint plans, go-to-market plans and marketing campaigns.

Williams says deeper engagement with local partners is one of three key drivers he hopes to tap to allow the company to continue achieving dramatic growth, alongside increased focus on the midmarket and enterprise segment and growth for the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider program.

While Williams says Veeam 'loves' its long tail of resellers who may only transact occasionally with the company, its focus is on working with partners where it can build joint plans and go to market together around both Veeam and its partner alliances such as HP and EMC.

He says the company is keen to develop some of its sliver partners into gold partners over the coming year. The company has five platinum partners and 33 gold partners across ANZ.

The deepening relationship brings with it an expectation of deeper skills from its channel partners, and Veeam will launch its Veeam Certified Engineering Program (VMCE) in New Zealand on 01 March.

The program is a requirement for Platinum and Gold partners, and provides partners with the deep level of expertise equivalent to Veeam's own system engineers.

"It allows them to be very productive, from positioning Veeam to their customers and prospects, as well as meeting the service requirements customers have around meeting Veeam deployments or Veeam plus other alliance partner deployments," Williams says.

Local training will be provided by Saxons, based on the Veeam Availability Suite v9, and is available online.

On the commercial and enterprise side, Williams says the company is making 'a lot of investment' in its field sales organisation to find opportunities to pass back through the channel.

Williams says Veeam has 'a nice window of opportunity 'to capitalise on the challenges legacy backup vendors are facing with de-mergers and declining profits.

"It's a really big opportunity for Veeam from a technology perspective, we're in the right place at the right time and we're getting more and more pull from those larger organisations, whereas before they were kind of locked in with these legacy vendors," he says.

"From the partner perspective, there is the opportunity to do a lot of services around Veeam, not because the solution itself is difficult to deploy, but for the customer to get the most value out of that investment – making sure they've got it configured right, getting the reports they want out of the information, tying it together with their Hyper-V or VMware and storage…," Williams says.