Johannesburg, 14 Jun 2016
Veeam Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise, announced strong growth in its EMEA Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program as partners and customers seek more comprehensive cloud-based Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRAAS) solutions.
The VCSP program is designed specifically for hosting, cloud and managed service providers and has seen 78% rental revenue growth in EMEA between Q1 2015 and Q1 2016. With ready-made opportunities for service providers to acquire new customers and grow recurring revenue through the VCSP, the program reported a 65% increase in the number of rental transactions in the same period. As of Q1 2016, Veeam counts over 5 900 service providers as part of the EMEA VCSP network. In 2015, more than 500 VCSP partners and over 70 aggregators gained licences to deliver flagship services for Veeam Cloud Connect, which will form a central pillar of the VSCP strategy as cloud-based DRAAS opportunities are realised.
With the continued success of its service provider program, Veeam is moving closer to achieving its goal of $1 billion in annual revenue by 2018 by leveraging new opportunities with its partner community, particularly around cloud-based DRAAS offerings. Gartner forecasts that more than 50% of disaster recovery plans will use cloud services by 2018, while research from 451 Research shows that public storage spend will double in two years as on-premises storage declines, heightening the need for robust, cloud-based DRAAS to meet the demand.
To enable partners to maximise this opportunity, deliver trusted availability solutions via the cloud and carve out new - or expanded - routes to market, Veeam has rolled out VCSP enhancements including:
* Release of DRAAS offerings within Veeam Availability Suite v9 including Veeam Cloud Connect Replica.
* The Veeam Cloud and Service Provider User Group - a community-specific group for cloud- and service-providers using Veeam Availability Suite that encourage service providers to share best practice and advice.
* Service lookup for partners and/or customers to find a service provider in their area that offers cloud repositories using Veeam Cloud Connect.
* New sales and marketing benefits for Gold and Platinum partners.
"Veeam operates on a channel-based business model and recognises that the success of the VCSP program contributes to the company's mission. These enhancements will create a more empowered and enabled channel community, to help customers implement vital DRAAS solutions while reaping the revenue rewards themselves," said Garcia.
In the wake of recent high-profile incidents, and more comprehensive solutions available on the market, the demand for cloud backup and disaster recovery is gradually rising according to Veeam's research amongst its end customers and service providers communities:
* Amongst the customer community, for cloud data protection, almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents indicated that everything is kept on-premises. While some testing of workloads in the cloud is underway (17%), others are currently running many (7%) or some (13%) mission-critical workloads in the cloud.
* Customer responses also suggest that a hybrid cloud setup is gaining momentum (24%) with 26% considering it for future plans for DRAAS purposes.
* However, according to Veeam's partner community, many of these customers must do more. Partner respondents state that less than a quarter of end customers have a cloud data protection strategy. Most of these customers have some mission-critical workloads in the cloud (23%) or are testing a new workloads in the cloud (22%), but adoption needs to pick up for benefits to be fully realized.
"Many of the products in the market today offer a DRAAS solution in addition to, or separate from, an overall data protection strategy, often pulling the focus of IT away from their current data centre investments and momentum. These solutions add an additional layer of management complexity, and often leave businesses uncertain that they can actually recover if something goes terribly wrong," said Laurent Garcia, Cloud/Hosting Director EMEA at Veeam. "Veeam defines DRAAS as part of a comprehensive availability strategy, embracing investments made in the data center and extending them through the hybrid cloud. The extended functionality of Veeam Cloud Connect for VM replication and the failover capabilities in Veeam Availability Suite v9 give service providers the ability to provide their customers with cloud-based DRAAS."
The 2016 Veeam Availability Report found that downtime is costing enterprises $16 million a year in lost revenue and productivity, with an average of 152 incidents per year. Garcia believes that, despite the clear benefits, not enough companies have heeded the warning that a more robust cloud DRAAS strategy needs to be put in place.
"Too often, organisations are hiding their heads in the clouds when it comes to the risk of downtime, when they should be putting their DR solution there instead. By aligning DR and availability strategies, IT departments can truly leverage the benefits of hybrid cloud architecture without sacrificing that critical direct line of communication and personal relationship with the DRAAS provider. IT departments then have the ability to shift this responsibility to a service provider they know and trust, while retaining the ability to configure and consume the service the way they want." said Garcia.
What partners are saying about Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) Program:
"StratoGen relies on Veeam to protect thousands of mission critical virtual machine workloads in public and private cloud hosting environments in eight data centres on four continents. StratoGen and Veeam also offer our clients to protect their on-premise critical data by acting as a cloud repository using Veeam Cloud Connect." - Dan Gould, CTO, StratoGen
"Our mission in Nexica is to guarantee the business continuity of our clients, so in 2012 we decided to integrate Veeam technology into our on-demand cloud solution because of its native hypervisor support, capacity to scale, diverse customer scenarios and reliability. The product maturity and our business partnership with Veeam Software have been improving over these years." -Albert Ginesta, COO, Nexica
"Many happy customers use Veeam Cloud Connect to store backups of their VMs in the High-Secure-Datacentres of Noris Network AG in Germany. With the new Veeam Cloud Connect Replication we are now able to provide our customers a complete DRAAS solution." - Joern Westermann, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure, Noris Network AG
Veeam showcases the success of its best VCSP partners by running awards at regional events such as Veeam Partner Summits and VeeamON Forum 2016 across EMEA, and was recently recognised as 'Coolest Cloud Vendor' by CRN.
Resources
* For more information on the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) Program enhancements, visit: Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP).
* Your DRAAS opportunity awaits! Learn more: https://www.veeam.com/cloud-connect-replication-service-providers.html.
* Find a service provider - Veeam Cloud & Service Provider directory: https://www.veeam.com/find-a-veeam-cloud-provider.html.
* For those interested in becoming a Veeam ProPartner, please visit: https://www.veeam.com/service-providers.html.
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