New Veeam CMO Kate Hutchison: Pulling Partners Into The Cloud And Attacking The Enterprise Market

'Hit the ground running hard'

Kate Hutchison, the new Chief Marketing Officer at data availability vendor Veeam, is already planning a comprehensive push to strengthen the company's channel operation as it focuses on its move into the enterprise market.

Hutchison, a more-than-20-year industry veteran who has held CMO roles at Riverbed, Polycom, VMware and Citrix, said ensuring that Veeam's channel partners have the marketing resources they need, as well as clear, powerful messaging will vault the Baar, Switzerland company into its next stage of growth with a particular focus on expanding its presence in the North America market.

Hutchison takes over for Peter Ruchatz, who was Veeam CMO for nearly four years and left the company about six months ago to take the CMO and chief product officer at MeteoGroup. She oversees a team of more than 300 people globally and has responsibility for product marketing, corporate marketing and global events.

Hutchison said she's intent on moving fast. "We're in the planning stages for 2018 looking at areas for investment so we can hit the ground running hard with a plan for SMB, the midmarket and the enterprise," she said.

What follows is an edited excerpt of Hutchison's conversation with CRN.

What's your mission coming into the CMO position at Veeam?

I had heard the name Veeam. I had heard a little bit about the company, but I had no idea the kind of momentum Veeam had. I think that, first and foremost, is what struck me as particularly remarkable. The company is 11 years old and has had 36 quarters of double-digit growth. I don't know many companies that could say that right now. I think we're up to 262,000 customers. The other thing that's overwhelming is the sheer number of partners we have, both resellers and new alliance partnerships we're forming. That's really critical because that's where we get scale. I've been at companies that get to about this size, but they struggle with how they're going to scale in terms of enlisting the reseller-distributor community.

How do you overcome that?

We're well-poised to continue the trajectory we're on. When you look at the momentum of the company, and you look at where we can grow, one area where we have a lot of upside potential is in the enterprise space, which is where I've spent the last 20 years of my career. Things are done a little differently in terms of go-to-market when you're trying to reach into the enterprise. One key component of that is customer-facing enablement, and getting a channel and sales team well choreographed to work with customers and be seen as trusted advisors to those customers, to be able to help them with a strategy for their digital transformation efforts as it relates to data availability, data protection, and data management. That's something that's very near and dear to my heart, and a big reason why I joined.

Do you see an opportunity for expansion or greater market share in North America?

I think we have a lot of opportunities to build our brand in North America. We're very successful in EMEA. More than 50 percent of our revenue is coming from there, but we have a lot of potential here in North America, and I think that's pretty exciting. In terms of where I think I can have the most impact, that's what I see.

How do you envision helping Veeam differentiate from the variety of competitors in this space from upstarts like Rubrik, to market mainstays like Commvault, to the legacy hardware vendors?

When it comes to the primary hardware vendors, the good news is that we're agnostic to hardware. We can partner with all of the best, and bring differentiated offers to market with them. Honestly, when I look at the competition, there's one thing that's striking: The biggest issue is the need to build our brand awareness, because if we're in a proof-of-concept, we win 90 percent of the time. That tells me that part of our challenge, and our opportunity, is to really get our name out there and really get our value proposition known. The way I view enterprise marketing is that it is very much word-of-mouth, reputation-building on the part of customers who have bet their business on you already. One thing we'll be doing a lot more of is really bringing our customers to the forefront of our go-to-market messaging. When you listen to the kinds of problems we're helping customers solve, they're saying some incredible things about Veeam and I think we could do a much better job of getting those messages out to the marketplace.

Do you have plans in place already for how to do that?

It's a whole initiative we're working on to really think through our positioning and messaging. I've been at Riverbed, Polycom, Citrix, VMware. Every company I've been at, I joined because the center of my gravity as CMO is really thinking through the vision and strategy of the company and listening to customers talk about where they envision running into problems down the road, three years from now, and really taking that into consideration and creating a story, a narrative for Veeam that aligns to what our customers are saying. Our customers aren't thinking about that at night. We are. We need to have a compelling vision for where we see our roadmap going, how we envision our platform growing and to anticipate the needs [customers] don't know they have. It takes time, but we have the underpinnings.

What industry trends do you anticipate targeting with the Veeam roadmap?

Very initially, I'm very impressed with how we think about the orchestration of data management. The sophistication of that, and the intelligence that's needed. We can do to any physical, virtual or cloud environment. There are different reasons to be in those environments, and there are different intelligence policies that need to be applied to those. I'm realizing that this is a sophisticated system we've built, and when I think about what's coming down the pipeline, it's exciting. We're just in the very early days of figuring out how we put this together in the market and how we articulate it, but it's so much more to me than the availability suite than we've gone to market with if we think about it in terms of all the availability nodes and how we think about protecting those, keeping them available and moving them around. It's exciting.

What do you want Veeam's channel partners to know as you begin your tenure as CMO?

One of the most important things is to make sure we embrace the channel as our extended family of folks on the front lines. When I was at Citrix, I went to a sales kick-off, which was just the sales team at the time, and then I went to the channel kick-off, and I realized, oh, that's a channel company. Fully embracing the channel and realizing that the same amount of energy I put into the enablement of our field teams, if not more, has to go into the channel because they're not in the building every day. We're really focusing on making sure they understand the message, that they can articulate the message, that they get trained on the message is really critical. We've produced specific material just for the channel so that we can bring them on board and they feel like an equal member of the Veeam family.

What are those materials?

One thing that really goes a long way is a company being consistent in how it talks about itself. We've produced messaging handbooks. It sounds like a simple thing, but when you give a customer-facing team a 30-page document that says this is how we describe ourselves, our vision, our strategy, our positioning, our corporate portfolio, how we position each one of our products to customers and how they're saying they get the value. When that's tailored to the channel, and the channel is trained on it, you're really bringing them on board to be consistent in the way we describe Veeam. One of the things that's really tough is if you ask ten people at a company what the strategy is, you'll get ten different answers. By writing it down, having the executive team review that and then become the champion that cascades it through the company and the channel, that messaging is extremely powerful. That messaging can be a differentiator in itself.

What role to you think you'll play in Veeam's partner recruitment efforts?

It's probably too early to tell exactly what role I'll play, but we can make sure we're equipping the channel with the things it needs to make it easy to do business with us; looking at how we segment the channel. We have quite a few service provider partners, and we're making sure they feel that they have support within marketing internally for their programs, looking at how we distribute partner development funds, create programs where there's skin in the game on both sides. These are the things that go a long way toward working together and realizing that their resources and our resources together are a powerful combination.

What do you need from partners to be successful in those efforts?

Partners are on the front lines. They're hearing things from customers that are essential to be fed back into the marketing organization. We're also winning deals with partners. Being able to jointly announce those wins and to recognize the partners that are doing the best job, rewarding them for that not financially, but with recognition of partners that are contributing to growing our business together.

Where do you think partners can have the most impact with Veeam in the cloud services market?

There's such nuances with regard to the different clouds out there, how they're delivering a managed service to customers, and that's an area I'd like to learn a lot more about. Things like backup-as-a-service, disaster recovery-as-a-service. These are new ideas for me to be thinking about in terms how can we work together to build awareness that we're offering those services together, what the benefits of those services are. I'm new to that area, but I think we're getting a lot of momentum there and moving to a subscription model is critical to us. We already have a lot of traction there, and I think we can learn an awful lot from [the channel] about the business and what's different when you provide these capabilities as a service rather than putting them in a license model and selling them on-prem.

Are partners moving quickly enough into the cloud services arena?

Partners have doubled the number of virtual machines they're backing up year-over-year. That's pretty good momentum. Clearly, the cloud is a critical component of where we're focusing with availability and the support we offer across any cloud, and any multi-cloud environment. They need to work much more closely and to realize that there are combination services between public cloud environment, managed cloud environment, private cloud environment, and really being able to orchestrate across multi-cloud environments will become increasingly more important.