Veeam’s Larissa Crandall Eyes New Alliances, Expanding Partner Program
Alliances with security providers are in the works.
June 1, 2023
![Veeam's Larissa Crandall talks alliances Veeam's Larissa Crandall talks alliances](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt8e5a1a79a02b5027/6523f86a911d6eb200e4c8cb/Alliance.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
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Channel Futures: What did you learn as VP of global channel and alliances at Gigamon that you hope to bring into the ecosystem at Veeam?
Veeam’s Larissa Crandall: There are two places that I’m continuing to concentrate on here. One is on the enablement front, ensuring the right certifications enablement, that our partners are trained on where Veeam is going. I’ve spent a ton of time with our CTO, [Danny Allan], discussing where we are going in our products and go-to-market. What’s the content? What do we want to share with the channel? What do we want to train them on?
The other big priority is on the alliance front. If you take the Veeam Data Platform and the Veeam product set, a ton of alliances are attached to it in the go-to-market security of storage in the cloud. I’m closely paying attention to where we’re going from a road map perspective to get ahead of the alliances, to cover the core of who we are integrated with, who we are selling with and who we are partnering with.
CF: What are the next steps?
CR: On the alliances front, it’s continuing to build up the security alliances, and obviously, with us focusing on ransomware, our channel was asking for our partner SEs to continue to enhance and complement the platform and going to market with those new security alliances.
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CF: Where do you stand with those security alliances?
CR: Trying to define them and to segment them. Again, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Danny to determine who we want to partner with and who we want to do joint selling with. Maybe it’s joint selling via the channel in the partner ecosystem. And then, how do we continue to enhance the overall platform and the product around security, and on the integration front, and make sure that the alliance team is tight with the CTO office.
CF: What’s the status of those security alliances?
CR: We are continuing to profile them, and looking at how mutually beneficial would be. There’s still work to be done on that. You’ll continue to see announcements there.
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CF: Is that deeper interaction with the CTO office a new approach?
CR: It is newer to Veeam in really ensuring that our alliances and the partner programs are attached to our road map and to the CTO office. The CTO office is extremely important. Early on, I spent a lot of time with them and I’m continuing to spend time with them. Because if I think of what the evolution of Veeam is right now, if you think of prior cloud alliances that we have built, now there are security alliances, and continuing to enhance and develop our primary and secondary storage alliances is extremely important. [We need to make] sure that we have a mutual benefit, and that the alliances are integrated within the field, and with the channel.
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CF: How are you applying that with Veeam’s storage alliances?
CR: For example, I just met with Pure. They’re a great alliance partner to emulate because we have great synergy, similar culture, and better together within the channel. Better together within from a sales perspective, field perspective. Our field and their field sellers are tightly integrated in how we’re going to go to market, in terms of customers that we’re going to target. We already have joint value props making incredible noise and gaining traction, growth and pipeline, and we’re closing opportunities and winning. That’s important for me, because if you consider where I started, it was at a solution provider, Connection. I was there for 15 years. So that’s why I think like a partner rep. I think like a partner SC and ensuring that everything that we’re developing from relationships to content to enablement to how we go to market and how our positioning is channelized.
CF: Were you a Veeam partner when you were at Connection?
CR: Yes, Veeam was on the floor, everywhere. I knew Veeam very well.
CF: What can you say about the rise in object storage?
CR: Those are some of our core alliances as well, ensuring that same thing, that we have a joint go-to-market together that’s mutually beneficial. It’s prescriptive. That’s really important to me, to define who’s giving customers what to each other. So, for instance, if we have alliance partners who want to continue to grow or get into the enterprise, we will look at how can we mutually help each other, continue to grow, and build up the market.
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CF: Are there new forms of enablement you’re looking at?
CR: We launched some of them. We’ve done a lot of work on the competency tracks, and more of it is driven around business outcomes. So, we have a ransomware track and cloud track, for instance; we also have a container track. So we’re shifting to enabling partners that way, instead of the typical speeds and feeds certifications. We launched both technical and sales certifications last month. We’re going to continue to grow, and we’re going to continue to launch some more in the summer. So we’ll continue to enhance that the second half of the year.
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CF: What are the new training and certification requirements for partners associated with this new direction?
CR: We’re going to hold them to the compliance just as we always have within the partner program, but there are different tracks. There’s the VAR side, and we also did certain tracks that are related to the VCSPs, the service providers, because some of the competencies weren’t specific to them. What I wanted to ensure is that we’re paying attention to what the particular partner ecosystem is in developing enablement and content for that partner ecosystem, because they are very different from GSIs, which are different than VARs, and are different than alliances. They were all lumped together before, but they all go to market differently.
CF: How would you describe the transition?
CR: I would say our competency tracks and certifications will continue to be partner-centric. We have been spending a lot of time on this, to make sure we’re not developing something inside out, or we’re launching a certification program that we think is amazing and saying, “You have to get certified.” I spent time [at VeeamON] in a meeting with 30 partner SCs, and I was asking them what they need for enablement.
CF: What did you take away from that meeting? Was there anything that stood out that they commonly wanted?
CR: A lot of them said they were pleased with the certifications that we just launched, they loved the changes that we made to them in more of this business-outcome and use-case driven [sense] versus speeds and feeds that they’re seeing, and/or they must go through with other vendors.
CF: What’s the deadline for them to make this transition?
CR: They have a year to get through it, so April 2024.
Photo courtesy Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock
CF: What are the new training and certification requirements for partners associated with this new direction?
CR: We’re going to hold them to the compliance just as we always have within the partner program, but there are different tracks. There’s the VAR side, and we also did certain tracks that are related to the VCSPs, the service providers, because some of the competencies weren’t specific to them. What I wanted to ensure is that we’re paying attention to what the particular partner ecosystem is in developing enablement and content for that partner ecosystem, because they are very different from GSIs, which are different than VARs, and are different than alliances. They were all lumped together before, but they all go to market differently.
CF: How would you describe the transition?
CR: I would say our competency tracks and certifications will continue to be partner-centric. We have been spending a lot of time on this, to make sure we’re not developing something inside out, or we’re launching a certification program that we think is amazing and saying, “You have to get certified.” I spent time [at VeeamON] in a meeting with 30 partner SCs, and I was asking them what they need for enablement.
CF: What did you take away from that meeting? Was there anything that stood out that they commonly wanted?
CR: A lot of them said they were pleased with the certifications that we just launched, they loved the changes that we made to them in more of this business-outcome and use-case driven [sense] versus speeds and feeds that they’re seeing, and/or they must go through with other vendors.
CF: What’s the deadline for them to make this transition?
CR: They have a year to get through it, so April 2024.
Photo courtesy Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock
Six months into her new role overseeing Veeam’s global channel ecosystem, Larissa Crandall has executed some key changes with more rolling out in the coming months. Crandall provided some insights on those changes at last week’s VeeamON 2023 conference in Miami.
Larissa Crandall at VeeamON 2023
Crandall met with partners during the Veeam Partner Day session at the conference, where she indicated that forming alliances with key security providers is a major priority. Also, she is seeing through the rollout of Veeam’s new partner program.
Veeam chief revenue officer John Jester introduced Crandall at Veeam Partner Day, held on the first day of VeeamON.
“She has hit the ground running,” Jester told partners attending the event.
Crandall joined Veeam in December after holding a similar role at Gigamon. At VeeamON, Channel Futures sat down with Crandall to discuss the changes underway to the Veeam partner ecosystem.
Channel Futures: How would you describe your role at Veeam?
Larissa Crandall: Veeam never had a vice president, global channel and alliances leader, to bring the entire partner ecosystem from global perspective together. Obviously, there have been channel leaders within each geo. I was tasked with – and still am – building a channel strategy across the entire ecosystem to bring it all together. We have [global system integrators], VARs, alliances, channel marketplaces and [Veeam cloud and service providers] covering our entire partner ecosystem. My role is to ensure that we have the right programs, the right strategy, training and enablement from a global perspective, and how we want to go to market. That’s what I did at Gigamon, and now I’m working on bringing that together here at Veeam.
Read the rest of our Q&A with Crandall in the slideshow above.
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