Veeam Enhances Offerings To Be A ‘Perfect’ Fit For MSPs

Data protection and management software firm Veeam is continuing to expand its efforts to make its offerings and programs an ideal fit for MSPs, as the company continues to seek to displace legacy backup offerings that are “slow, clunky and costly,” a Veeam representative said Thursday.

The Baar, Switzerland-based software vendor has made a number of recent moves to make its offerings and programs an even better match for MSPs, said Evan Dressler, an inside sales representative with the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider (VCSP) program. For instance, Veeam has launched special “hosting rental licenses” that are geared toward MSPs, he said.

[Related: Veeam Extends Data Protection To All NAS, Enhances Instant Recovery]

To facilitate the licenses, Veeam has created a self-service portal “where VCSPs who have signed a volume rental agreement with us … can create and download Veeam keys in a matter of moments,” Dressler said. “This allows you to stay away from a lengthy quote process. And with this, you own and manage these keys and have the ability to resell them to your customer however you see fit. We understand that as an MSP, you package your products and services in different ways, and our hosting rental licenses accommodate this perfectly.”

Dressler offered the remarks Thursday during a session at the NexGen+ 2020 Virtual Experience, which is being presented by CRN parent The Channel Company.

Veeam has made some major strides with MSPs over the past year or two, and the improvements are being rolled out on a continuous basis, said Travis Adair, principal partner and vice president at InfiniTech Consulting, an MSP and Veeam partner based in Columbia, Mo.

“It seems like each quarter a new piece of the puzzle gets filled in,” Adair said. “They’ve been making a lot of strides for the small business—for our managed services clientele. At this point we’re pushing Veeam out to almost all of our managed services customers, just as part of our package.”

He noted that his company’s revenue associated with Veeam offerings has surged about 40 percent so far this year compared with the same period last year.

Veeam’s MSP-friendly moves have included recent updates that have “driven our efficiencies internally,” Adair said. Those have included improvements in the past year with the Veeam Availability Console, which lets MSPs manage many customer deployments from a centralized place, he said.

“It used to be that we still had to log in to individual servers to perform some of the updates. But now, all updating has been centralized, and the reporting capabilities have been improved,” Adair said.

Veeam is also catering to the needs of MSPs and their smaller customers in terms of the ways that backups can be deployed, said Brandon McCoy, senior system engineer at Veeam, during the NexGen+ session.

“You may want to set up a customer that only does local backups. So you’ll still connect them to your Cloud Connect environment. But you don’t have to give them any cloud-based storage,” McCoy said. “So this is perfect for an MSP who doesn’t want to offer off-site backups—they don’t have their own data center—but they do want to be able to log in to a Windows machine that they have and get visibility into all their clients.”

Meanwhile, “if you’re one of those MSPs who doesn’t have any kind of infrastructure—you don’t have a place to set this console up, you don’t want to run this Windows machine—we have a plethora of cloud service providers who offer these services and white-label it,” McCoy said. “They’ve got the Cloud Connect, they’ve got the service provider console. And you, as an MSP, have the ability to add your clients under their console.”