Veeam Tames Virtualized Environments

Company:

Headquarters: Columbus, OH

Technology Sector: Virtualization

Key Product: Veeam Backup & Replication

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 3,000 resellers and service provider partners worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Virtualization is a hot technology for solution providers right now, but it adds more complexity to IT networks. Veeam develops a line of tools to monitor and manage virtual IT environments.

The Lowdown: Virtualization improves the availability and scalability of IT systems and helps lower operating costs. But hypervisors, the core component of virtualization systems, work between operating systems and the rest of an IT network, adding another layer of management complexity.

Enter Veeam, a developer of tools for monitoring and managing IT in virtualized environments. Veeam is closely allied with VMware (the company is a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner) and offers a line of products for VMware management chores such as data backup and replication, system monitoring and reporting, and configuration and performance management. The vendor also supports Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software, but as of yet doesn't support virtualization technology from Citrix.

Veeam's founders, including President and CEO Ratmir Timashev, saw how quickly virtualization technology was being adopted by businesses and recognized there were significant gaps in how that technology was being deployed and managed. That led to the company's founding in 2006, said Rick Hoffman, vice president of channels and alliances (Many of Veeam's management team worked at Aelita Software, a developer of network management tools, which was acquired by Quest Software in 2004).

Thanks to its acquisition of nworks in 2008, Veeam also markets connectors between VMware virtual infrastructure and systems management tools from Microsoft (System Center) and Hewlett-Packard (OpenView). That allows IT managers to collect data from virtualized systems and feed it back to System Center and OpenView to simplify systems management tasks.

Veeam also offers a number of free products, including Veeam Business View for managing VMware vSphere environments and Veeam FastSCP for managing VMware ESX files. Those products help Veeam show off its "technical prowess," Hoffman said, and generate sales leads for the vendor's commercial products.

And because Veeam sells only through the channel using a two-tier distribution model, all those leads go right to the company's solution provider partners. "First and foremost, our secret sauce is out partner network," Hoffman said. "They're really our eyes and ears and support on the street."

Veeam's partners are generally specialists in virtualization and systems management, according to Hoffman. Many are also VMware and Microsoft partners. The roster includes solution partners that sell to small, mid-size and large businesses. Some bundle Veeam software with hardware and other software products and build a range of services around the packages. Others are more in the consulting space, some are systems integrators and others focus on volume sales and distribution of Veeam products.

"We've made Veeam a mainstay of our virtualization solution," said Craig Stein, partner and solution architect at Mirazon, a Louisville, Ky.-based solution provider that partners with Veeam and Microsoft. Mirazon resells Veeam Backup & Replication and Veam Management Suite, among other products. "Those are really key to the protection and recovery of the virtual machines," he said. Stein had praise for Veeam's technology. "First and foremost, it's very affordable," he said. It's easy to learn to work with, he said, and the software's features and capabilities deliver on the vendor's promises. "It does what they say it's going to do."

Veeam continues to recruit channel partners and, based on a survey of partners in 2009, is making improvements to the ProPartner program, Hoffman said. Those include providing more training opportunities through the Internet and major distributors, developing programs to provide partners with more sales leads, creating more joint marketing and promotional programs, putting more channel managers in the field and creating a partner advisory council in early 2010.