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Veeam embraces subscription, cloud with new hybrid cloud platform
Thu, 25th Aug 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Veeam is making the move to a more subscription focused business model, announcing a new Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud in a move it says dramatically expands its market penetration.

The Veeam Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud will provide businesses and enterprises of all sizes with tools to ensure availability for virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads.

The backup and recovery specialist says the platform provides enterprise continuity with recovery service level objectives of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, and DR orchestration; along with workload mobility and proactive monitoring, repoting, testing and documentation to ensure business and regulatory requirements are met.

Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy and chief evangelist, says the new offerings will provide resellers with a more constant revenue stream from Veeam, while allowing them to build better relationships with customers.

“This is a chance for them to check up and make sure they have everything they need on an ongoing basis. You can go back and revisit them every year as the subscription renews,” Hazelman says.

“But also, from a services standpoint, because of the tools we're providing them to provide additional services – whether they do it themselves or resell it from another cloud provider – it's an additional revenue stream for partners.

The Availability Platform includes a new Availability Console, a cloud-enabled platform for service providers and distributed enterprise environments.

Hazelman says the offering will ‘help someone not used to reselling to take a look at selling services'.

“It's a dashboard, it's got billing in there, they can manage multiple customers from a single interface.

Veeam Availability Orchestrator, announced several months ago, also forms part of the platform. The Orchestrator is ‘a sell with' offering, requiring Veeam Availability Suite.

The subscription, per VM Orchestrator offers resellers the opportunity to go back to customers and upsell.

“Customers may not want to orchestrate their entire environment, but just a proportion of it,” Hazelman says, adding that resellers will now have the ability to upsell the additional offering.

Also included in the platform are the agent technologies Agent for Microsoft Windows and Agent for Linux, available per workload.

“From a cloud perspective if they're already paying a subscription to run their workload in the cloud they shouldn't have to pay a perpetual license to protect it,” Hazelman says.

Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Cloud Connect round out the platform.

Hazelman says the company will be making a slow transition over the next 12 to 18 months to a more subscription-based model.

The company's flagship Veeam Availability Suite, however, will continue to be available on a per socket, perpetual basis.

“But we will introduce subscription SKUs, if the customer wants to use opex instead of capex.

“With 200,000 customers we can't force everyone to a whole new licensing model,” he says.

“The core business isn't changing any time soon in terms of how our resellers or partners are going to position or even sell Veeam.

Hazelman says it is crucial for partners to prepare for more subscription based selling, not just from Veeam but from other providers, though he acknowledges ANZ is ‘more advanced' in its acceptance of the change.

“It's a change for us and it will be a change for them as well,” he says.

“A lot of the new products will be coming in subscription model, rather than perpetual and we need to make sure from the channel perspective that it still works out for them to sell these subscription offerings.

“That's something we need to get right and we are working very hard to make sure we roll out programs with the new products to make it very channel friendly.

Peter McKay, Veeam president and COO, says the offering ‘represents an inflection point' for Veeam.

“Veeam Availability Platform dramatically expands our capabilities and market penetration.

“It marks a new era in how we address enterprise requirements for a comprehensive availability solution for virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads.