Fighting the surge towards cloud is futile for resellers, who must instead move quickly to at least begin embracing the new business model, a visiting Veeam expert says.

Luca Dell'Oca, Veeam cloud evangelist, says instead of trying to fight cloud services, resellers must be proactive ‘and again become the trusted advisors of their own customers and start offering these new services'.

Dell'Oca, who is currently in New Zealand as part of an ANZ Veeam roadshow for service providers and resellers, says the service provider and cloud business arena is a key focus for Veeam.

“With Veeam Cloud Connect we started to add specific solutions for service providers and we see in our own strategy for the short to mid-term, the cloud business as one of the pillars of our strategies.

“Cloud services are not even something coming in the future, it is happening now.

“The best way for our resellers to go into this market is not to try to fight this new opportunity, but by being proactive and offering some of these services before some of their other competitors offer it.

“At some point cloud services are going to be so wide spread that even the end-user by themselves are going to explore these possibilities.

“You are supposed to be the trusted advisor for new services, so instead of trying to avoid the discussion or pretending there aren't these services around, you need to try to explore these new services.

“Every reseller of Veeam has their own customer base.

“It is really easy to acquire these services from other service providers or decide to build your own, and then go to your customer base and offer these new additional services.

Dell'Oca says even without finding new customers, cloud services offer ‘additional and more viable services' for the existing customer base, increasing revenue while also moving the customer to the cloud with an easy step.

“It's an easy way for the reseller to explore these new technologies – if you want to call them new, because they really are not even new – and see if it fits their business model.

“And from there on move on to increase the business.

Dell'Oca says Veeam's core business of availability provides a prime opportunity for resellers to dip their toes in the cloud landscape.

“Availability is probably one of the easiest ways to introduce cloud services to end-users because they don't have to move anything, like production workloads, into the public cloud.

“It is really easy to use the cloud as a secondary location for data protection and availability.

He says while many companies are still wary of moving valuable production data to the public cloud, availability offerings, such as disaster recovery-as-a-service or backup-as-a-service, enables them to keep firm hold of their production workloads, on premise, so they don't lose governance of the data.

“But instead of spending Capex money to build a secondary location for protecting their data, they can leverage cloud provider  services as a secondary location for the data.

“It's an easier way to introduce cloud services in general. That's why we started Cloud Connect with backup as a service as the first feature, because it's really easy to understand and really easy to be adopted by the user. It's a natural way to have a secondary location.

He says the company is seeing demand from subscribers already using Veeam Cloud Connect, which ‘is growing really fast' with more than 500 service providers worldwide running v8 of the Veeam Availability Suite, which introduced the Cloud Connect capability.

He stresses that the vendor is 100% channel based with its service provider offerings.

“Unlike other companies we don't have our own cloud solutions, or our own data center.

“We completely rely on existing service providers. We offer them the technology, but ultimately, they are the ones who are designing the final services to go out to market.

The company has its Veeam Cloud Provider program for service providers.

“We don't have any entry barrier for service providers so every Veeam reseller can also sign up to be a service provider and start offering their own services based on Veeam technology.

Earlier this week the vendor announced Veeam FastSCP for Microsoft Azure, which allows for easy VM copies, reducing a lot of the barriers to moving data from on-premise data centers to the Azure cloud.

The company also launched Veeam Management Pack v8 for Microsoft System Center, which builds on the product's advanced monitoring, alert management and reporting foundation with support for the latest on-premises hypervisor platforms, and new hybrid cloud planning tools.

Both products are currently available in beta, with FastSCP free.

He says Veeam resellers are seeing opportunities in the cloud business model, but acknowledges that the change for resellers can be big.

“When you become a service provider you need to change your business model. So first of all you need to understand how to do this new business... moving from a license reseller to ongoing monthly recurring revenues.

Dell'Oca say while some resellers will ‘go big' and build their own infrastructure and have their own data center, but Veeam is also seeing its partners at different levels begin to interact with each other and form partnerships.

“We have seen small and medium resellers that don't have the possibility to build their own infrastructure partnering with the bigger service providers that are already offering Veeam services.

“They are interacting with each other and the small reseller becomes a broker or reseller or white-label reseller of the bigger service provider.

Dell'Oca says local service providers can have an advantage of the large international public cloud offerings, being ‘a service provider with a face', particularly where the international provider doesn't have a local presence.

“Managing customer data always starts from gaining trust.

“You're managing something that is very important for the customer.

“So having someone who can show up in person, or the customer can call on the phone, someone that understands also the requirements of the local market and the mindset of the local market, means you can become the trusted service provider.