Veeam recently announced the winners of the Impact Partner Awards Latin America, where it recognizes 14 partners who have demonstrated outstanding performance and expertise in delivering modern data protection solutions across the region. We interviewed Sara Wilson, Channel Sales Director for the region, and Fabian Sperman, President of Adistec.
Last March 10, Veeam announced to the winners of the sixth annual Veeam Impact Partner Awards for Latin America where it recognized 14 Veeam ProPartners and Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners “who have not only demonstrated success in providing Veeam solutions to their customers, but who have also surpassed expectations in providing first-class support, expert knowledge, and continued product education,” the company stated in an announcement. Adistec was chosen as the Distributor of the Year for Latin America.
“The choice of the winner not only has to do with the market share, growth and revenue, but also with the commitment and dedication towards the brand, for example, investing in resources, marketing, campaigns directed to channels; and also focusing on Cloud, recurrent sales and part of education,” Sara Wilson mentioned to this media. “Adistec accomplishes the three things: it is a Training Center, a Cloud model distributor and also a traditional distributor,” she emphasized.
In more detail, the Director said that Adistec has a regional alliance with Veeam through which the distributor has an appliance installed in the company that drives its channels so that they can offer services to the end costumer. In addition, it has linked Data Centers that channels and end customers can use as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). “They have a lot of focus, dedication and very good engagement with our team throughout the region,” she stressed.
“It is the work we normally do as a company, not only product fulfillment or, in this case, licenses, but we work hard in channel enablement, education, engineering to help them in projects; and we also have a cloud offering that complements Veeam’s on-premises product,” Fabian Sperman said. “We do a comprehensive development of a very good product: one of the things I always highlight about Veeam compared to other manufacturers is their commitment and investment in the region, proportionally it is the vendor that invests more resources, which facilitates our work as distributors; we empower each other,” he said.
Drivers
When asked about the drivers that drove Veeam licensing during 2020, Wilson highlighted the acquisition of Kasten to accelerate the protection of native Kubernetes workloads in on-premises and multi-cloud environments, in addition to the new integration with Google Cloud in the brand new v11 of its flagship product, which adds to the partnerships they already had with AWS and Microsoft Azure. Additionally, it indicated that the customers have a very simple form of licensing, since they can use the licenses where they need them, either on premise or in the public or private cloud. “This year we are going to continue with our Act II and the transition of data to the cloud,” she affirmed.
Regarding the role of the distributor for this year, Sperman highlighted: “Veeam is a strategic brand for us and we will continue to deepen our alliance. With Veeam Backup & Replication v11 the product continues to be improved, trying to help in this hybrid cloud development transition in the region. Veeam was born for virtualized environments and developed a lot in that hybrid cloud vision and allows us to continue developing in 2021.”
Sperman acknowledged that the region is going to have a challenging Q2 due to the restrictive measures that are being taken in several countries because of the pandemic. “We expect it to recover for Q3; we will work a lot online as we are doing so far to promote that recovery,” he said.
“Our differential in the sale of Veeam is our most comprehensive approach, including the part of education, professional services, presale, enablement and integration with other products in everything that has to do with Data Center.”
Fabian Sperman
“Today, no channel that is in the Data Center is unaware of Veeam due to the work it did in the region and of course as a product.” It seems to me that there is a very great business opportunity, many channels have seen it, and I tell the rest to consider it because it is an excellent product,” Sperman concluded.
New incentives for the channel
Wilson highlighted Veeam’s renewed channel program, launched in early April, with some enhancements, noting that the channel can now count on renewal of subscriptions in its sales goals, new discounts, and an additional margin for new channels of the Register caterogy. Moreover, she informed about new VMSP (commercial) and VMTSP (presale) courses that are available free of charge on the company’s ProPartner portal. Furthermore, starting in May, Veeam will also release updated Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) courses in V11.
Reinforced attention to the channel
The Channel Director for the Veeam region also reported that the company unified its channel service teams, so that now the executive has a team of 25 people under her charge, and said that they assigned fewer channels to their Channel Managers. so that they can give more focus to their development, relying on an extended team of their distributors, including Adistec in these new services.
Wilson finally invited partners to participate of a new edition of her global event on May 25 and 26, and emphasized that first ones who register will obtain some benefits. And she mentioned that there will be a specific session for channels led by Kevin Rooney, Vice President, Americas Channel Sales of the company. “We are very excited and we hope to have a lot of leads to derive our partners,” she concluded.
