Amarish Karnik decodes Veeam’s channel strategy in India

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“Our strategy in India is to achieve long term rapid growth for our customers, channel partners, and the organisations with whom we collaborate in our alliance ecosystems,” says Amarish Karnik, Channel Sales Director – India and SAARC, Veeam Software.

For software and technology vendors, channel partners are the core backbone of their revenues and increasing their customer base. And that’s no different for Veeam Sofware, which develops software solutions and products in highly critical areas of data backup, disaster recovery and modern data protection.

However, in today’s digital age, software vendors look for channel partners beyond reselling and distribution. In fact, Veeam’s channel partner community not just had resellers and distributors, but also includes Value-Added Resellers, Distributors and Aggregators, Global System Integrators and Professional Services Providers. And these channel partners are backed through channel partner programmes which are updated annually to serve their commercial interests as well as business growth on a long-term basis.

In this interview, Amarish Karnik, Veeam Software’s Channel Sales Director – India and SAARC talks to TechHerald on Veeam’s channel strategy in 2023 for the Indian market, channel business outlook and the change in the approach of organisations and businesses in the post-pandemic years and more.

Edited excerpts

Q1. What is Veeam’s channel partner and reseller strategy in 2023 for the Indian market?
Amarish Karnik:
Veeam is a 100% channel business, and our ecosystem includes valued service providers, resellers, distributors, and alliance partners to service customers’ modern data protection needs. We have over 3,000 resellers and distributors in APJ, and we are all committed to ensuring business continuity across industries through uninterrupted access to any data and application across any hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud infrastructure.

Our strategy in India is to achieve long-term rapid growth for our customers, channel partners, and the organisations with whom we collaborate in our alliance ecosystems. We are also looking to expand our scale by investing in technology, talent, and areas that can help our partners grow.

Partners are the biggest component in our go-to-market strategy, they help us thrive in the evolving business landscape and better respond to customer demands. Furthermore, our partner ecosystem allows us to scale our business across markets (Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3) and various verticals. What distinguishes us as a channel-centric vendor is that our collaboration with partners provides considerable and continuous benefits.

Our partner programmes and our investments in the channel community are designed to help our partners grow, as we grow our business in the market, which makes it a very exciting prospect for our channel partners. We assist our partners in better understanding how their customers consume technology and rethinking their approach to implementing the best strategies for their customers that maximise both efficiencies and cost savings.

We educate them on how the cloud can improve business agility and lower the cost of providing a better customer experience, and arm them with the knowledge of the potential risks associated with moving businesses to a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world.

Our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VSCP) service is another area where we are seeing significant expansion. As customers look to buy things as a service, we are helping service providers deliver to our customer base. Partners in our robust Veeam Pro Partner Network are able to work directly with one another to build, market and sell Veeam’s solutions and services to their customers regardless of where they want to host their data. “Your success is our mission” is the foundation of our channel programmes. We look forward to further expanding and consolidating our partner network to constitute a strong channel ecosystem across markets.

Q2. From the Indian channel partners’ perspective, what’s the company’s business outlook in 2023?
Amarish Karnik:
Veeam is constantly innovating and is at the forefront of delivering modern data protection to our customers. We give them the confidence to accelerate digital transformation and drive business resiliency. We also offer modern data protection solutions for the multi-cloud enterprise through strong alliance partnerships and seamless technology integrations with leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Cloud, and IBM Cloud. Veeam has been consistently performing and has been the #1 Data Replication and Protection Provider (DR&P) worldwide, in IDC’s Semi-annual Software Tracker for 2H’21.

In addition to our global position, Veeam was the market share leader in EMEA and LATAM, third in APJ, and had the fastest Y-o-Y growth among the top five companies in all three regions. Being tied as #1 in the market is a huge accomplishment for not only Veeam but our entire ecosystem. Our customers and partners deserve credit for making this a reality.

As IT environments continue to grow more complex and demanding, IT leaders feel they aren’t sufficiently protected and it’s now obvious that modern data protection must be integrated into their overall cyber preparedness plan.

Our key focus for this year is to deliver modern data protection solutions for the multi-cloud enterprise and help customers manage and back up all new types of data that are critical to their environment. The new Veeam Data Platform brings the best of Veeam solutions together to deliver a single platform designed to give our customers the choice to leverage the right solution that fits their needs and keeps their business running.

APJ has been one of our fastest-growing regions with annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 27% year-over-year (YoY) in Q2’22. Within APJ, India plays an important role in the region’s growth, with brands such as Granules India, Mahindra Group, and Hero MotoCorp, deploying our solutions. In India, we plan to achieve rapid growth for our customers through our partner ecosystem. As we continue to gain market share and grow in India, we are also looking to expand our scale by investing in technology, talent, and areas that can help our customers and partners grow.

Q3. With the pandemic years almost ended, more organisations and businesses are moving back to the old ways of operations to an extent. Has this approach somewhat impacted Veeam’s go-to-market strategy in 2023?
Amarish Karnik:
With organisations expressing a desire to return to the pre-pandemic environment while continuing to embrace hybrid cloud and digital transformation, we want to help our partners add more value and build more strategic relationships with our customers. Veeam’s partner programmes and investments in the channel community are designed to help our channel partners grow as we grow our market business, making it an exciting prospect for our channel partners.

Veeam is a firm believer that the success of our partners reflects on our success as an organisation. We continuously strive to bring constant innovation to our product portfolio as well as our partner programmes to stay relevant in the industry. We have seen a change in the market dynamics and hence our partner programmes are always innovative and relevant. We have recognised that the move to cloud architectures and transition to agile opex and subscription-based IT is driving substantial change.

The cloud is a convenient way to store backups offsite and a cost-effective alternative to a traditional DR site. With the primary aim to support our partners in meeting the changing needs/requirements of customers and to accelerate their business as well as strengthen their revenue, Veeam is constantly driving competencies, simplicity, and consistency so partners can ensure customer success and meet their business objectives.

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