Veritas Updates Force Partner Program with Improved Margins, Incentives

The 2022 Veritas Force Partner Program now offers better margin opportunities, incentives and more timely payments. The data protection provider publicly revealed its updated partner program on Tuesday, though it officially took effect April 1.

While its entire channel stands to benefit from the updated program, the changes largely favor platinum partners and distributors. Overall, Veritas is signaling it will be more predictable in how it rewards partners. Particularly, the company is doubling down on those that bring in new business and competitive displacements.

The program also encourages partners to market its NetBackup, APTARE and Infoscale for ransomware protection and multicloud deployments. Partners are now eligible for double the rebate on registered opportunities to take out competitive data protection solutions with NetBackup. Veritas is also boosting incentives for partners who deploy the company’s InfoScale software-defined availability offering.

Improvements to the partner program come as Veritas is under siege from its key competitors. Notably, Veeam has surpassed Veritas in revenue growth as No. 2 in IDC’s Software Tracker for Data Replication & Protection. Asked about that, Veritas VP of channel sales and alliances Mike Walkey responded that his company is a market leader in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for data protection.

“We’re clearly the market leader,” Walkey told Channel Futures. “When you look at the overall Gartner Magic Quadrant, and at the voice of customer surveys that Gartner does, we’re at the top of class in terms of our capabilities in the market and customers who continue to vote with their wallet.”

Walkey insisted that Veritas “continues to see great traction in both renewals footprint and for new business. And we continue to expect to see that succeed and grow going forward.”

Last month, Veritas released NetBackup 9.1 with enhanced ransomware rollback protection and support for multicloud and Kubernetes-managed container environments.

Enhancements for Platinum Partners

The vendor’s largest platinum partners stand to gain the most from changes to the Veritas Force Partner Program, Walkey said.

Veritas’ Mike Walkey

“We’re really focused around our largest platinum partners and helping them drive that profitability profile and building the services capabilities that we know are important for their business,” he said.

Nevertheless, Walkey added that gold partners will also benefit from the program update.

“The incentives are consistent with what we’ve had in the past for platinum and gold partners,” he said. “There’s no degradation in the margin that they expect; in fact, there are increases in most of those economics for the gold and platinum partners.”

Also, Wakley said all partners will benefit from an improved schedule of payments.

“We had partner feedback that asked that it be oriented toward their current their quarterly attainment numbers, so we are allowing the partner to recognize those additional margin dollars quicker in the current quarter, when they’re earned.”

Extended Emphasis on Distributors

Distributors have played a key role in Veritas’ efforts to expand into small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Platinum and gold partners tend not to focus on SMBs, while many silver and unregistered partners often rely on distributors.

“They do a lot of the work to onboard those relationships, educate them, drive campaigns, build pipeline and close deals,” Walkey said. “We’re really rewarding distribution for the work that they do in those other tiers of partner relationships where they have the primary responsibility to grow and deliver that business with us as we move forward.”