Veeam Bolsters Channel Program with New Benefits for Key Partners

More than a year after first launching its Veeam Accredited Services Partner (VASP) program, the company now is bolstering it with more educational and training opportunities, additional sales and marketing support, and a wide range of other benefits.

The expanded VASP program, being made available to a select group of Veeam’s partners, will also add all-new VASP branding to allow participants to differentiate their higher level of Veeam training, sales and support with their customers.

Veeam’s Kevin Rooney

“The VASP program is being enhanced based on what was created initially last year when we started it,” Kevin Rooney, Veeam’s vice president of Americas partner sales, told Channel Futures. “It will remain a select group of partners” that are committed to the company’s products and services and who want to deepen their training, marketing and other services with Veeam.

“They will have privileged visibility from a marketing standpoint and will be promoted by Veeam in our partner directory” and through additional resources, he said. “We never really had a branding opportunity around the VASP program in the past. Now we will have a logo for partners in the program and they can use it in their communications with customers.”

In addition, Veeam will also offer marketing funds to select customers at the company’s discretion, he added.

From a business standpoint, the updated VASP program will provide select partners with deeper leverage into Veeam’s sales force, developers and others, giving them additional help in selling the company’s products, said Rooney.

“We are understanding the requirements that their customers are looking for service delivery and we don’t do it on our own,” so Veeam is deepening its work with partners to help make it happen, he said.

Under the new VASP program, select partners will also have access to Veeam’s Center of Excellence, which is a Veeam environment that includes a ProPartner portal and a wide array of services, dedicated training and support so partners can further assist their customers, said Rooney. Also included is a software architecture support line for early access to Veeam developers, as well as some new professional services offerings including access to Veeam demo labs, he said.

“Our customers were asking for it,” he said of the enhancements to the partner program. “They were asking us to give them a clearer services community, accredited by Veeam, with access to experts and labs and more. All of these were things that customers were looking at for ease of service. Our partners had skills but needed more Veeam help and educational opportunities.”

For partners, the VASP program improvements will likely provide more profit potential and allows them to show their training and expertise to customers, said Rooney.

“This allows them to do it much better, more efficiently and with better branding,” he said.

Under VASP, Veeam is restructuring its professional services department into a channel alignment model, which will allow it to more easily and directly provide internal resources exclusively to VASP members. Veeam, which sells Veeam backup and cloud data management applications and services, does all of its business through its channel partners.

Dan Timko, chief strategy officer at J2 Global for OffsiteDataSync, a Veeam partner, told Channel Futures that the VASP enhancements will allow his company to …

… deepen its involvement with the program after watching it patiently since it started earlier in 2018.

J2 Global for OffsiteDataSync’s Dan Timko

“The program has been around for a while, but until this announcement, we felt that there wasn’t a full commitment to the program and it was in a trial period,” said Timko. “This announcement and the enormous amount of resources that they’re now putting behind it demonstrates to us that this is real and that Veeam is fully committed to it.”

Some of the most valuable improvements, he said, are the ability to see some of Veeam’s internal intellectual property assets such as internal best practices and guides on how to build services around Veeam. Those benefits will help reduce the amount of work partners have to do from scratch when selling and deploying Veeam products, said Timko.

“We’ve invested heavily in our partnership with Veeam, so while the VASP program’s goal isn’t all that much different than it was before, they’re putting a ton of new resources behind it, which signals to us that they are completely committed to their partners,” he said. “This is what we were looking for.”

The new Veeam content and resources will go a long way toward helping OffsiteDataSync to train and enable its staff, he added.

“They’re taking on some of the burden of training and program building so we can spend more time building our business and serving our customers. It reaffirms Veeam’s commitment to a 100% channel strategy in which they deliver their solutions to customers through partners like us,” said Timko.

Another partner, Scott Lillis, president and CEO at Lillis Technology Group, a professional services company, said the enhancements in the updated VASP partner program will benefit his company as well.

“The realignment with this new program has acknowledged that and focuses on partners who have invested in their technical talent, both from certification and support internally,” said Lillis. “It’s really a win-win to help acknowledge partners with that technical depth. It gives stricter criteria to join the program. It helps us differentiate ourselves when we talk to clients so we can let them know that we’ve been through that extra level of rigor.”

Kevin Rhone, analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, said that Veeam’s VASP program updates are promising for affected partners. The company was talking about such possibilities earlier this year at its partner and user conference, he said.

“They were talking about the need for modifications and changes to the way they work with partners,” said Rhone. “They are carving out additional internal resources and technical, engineering and support resources that are reserved for their VASP members” who are looking for more help. “They are also ramping up certifications around skills, and those resources can be used to build partner branded services.”