Today is Partner Day at VeeamON and it kicked off with the partner keynote this morning at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. To call this a keynote would be somewhat misleading as it was more of talk show type atmosphere complete with a host and couches on stage. The only thing missing was a Top 10 list and a band. Honestly, it was a refreshing experience to sit and watch this unfold as keynotes can become a little monotonous and the laid back conversation style was definitely entertaining to watch.
The first guest of the evening was none other than Veeam founder and CEO Ratmir Timashev. Ratmir sat down in the hot seat if you will and took us through a journey of not only how Veeam was founded, but through Ratmir’s professional career as well. It’s always interesting to hear first hand how businesses are founded, funded and started and Ratmir has a great story around building his previous company, Aelita Software and how it was acquired by Quest, which lead him to eventually founding and starting up a small company called Veeam Software in 2006.
From there Ratmir went on to praise the channel partners, vars, and folks out there in the trenches selling and evangelizing Veeam, stating there are really three things which are needed to stay competitive in the market today; The best product, the best sales and marketing teams, and most importantly, the best partners. His praise towards the Veeam partner ecosystem was further backed up by some data, stating that 40% of customers surveyed stated that a major factor in their buying decisions around Veeam came from a partner recommendation. In my opinion this is a powerful statement and a very important one that centers around trust. It’s the trust that evolves in a customer-partner relationship which really solidifies how effective a partner is. Thankfully, Veeam has over 25,000 partners across the world that are ready and willing to take that trusted advisor role on.
After Ratmir we went into a more traditional type keynote with Dave Russell from Gartner taking the stage to talk a little about the trends inside of the storage and backup world. Dave had a tough act to follow and truly did give a great talk, outlining where he and Gartner see the future of IT and backup, more specifically the customer/enterprise buying cycle going within the next 4 years, and showing some validation to their claims by re-iterating predictions and statements that they have made in the past. Definitely some data that people could take back with them in order to further validate or prove a solution.
The Tonight Show style took over again with Chris Moore, Veeams’s North American Channel Chief now taking a seat on the couch! Chris summarized how Veeam is currently, and plans to support their partners outlining the many services and opportunities that Veeam provides to the channel. He did this by brining up a couple of partners as well as a couple executives from Veeam to talk about what they are doing in terms of partner enablement. Through the use of stories and shear numbers I think his point was well taken.
The complete keynote re-iterated one thing! Veeam is 100% dedicated to channel alignment and go to market strategies through their partners – and this isn’t going to change any time soon. Veeam is not shy about giving their partners “props” and are well aware that their successes, past, present and future and completely reliant on their partners, the people on the front line, promoting, selling, and evangelizing Veeam. Sure, some of the “partner speak” went right over my head. I’m not a partner but whatever was said must have been good as the place erupted in applause more than a few times.
All to often we see keynotes with speakers standing up dictating a PowerPoint – this, was not that! My props go back to Veeam for the laid back, conversational, humorous style of keynote delivered this morning. Throwing some personal touches in there really made the difference in my opinion and made this keynote a huge success! #VeeamON
