Establishing consistency with its existing partners while attracting new ones is Veritas’ primary goal as it rolls out phase one of its new channel program – and Canada is rife with opportunity, said the company’s vice-president of global channels.
“We’ve expanded Veritas’ investments in both channel heads supporting the region as well as programs to our distributors in Canada the last 16-18 months, and we will continue to do this. We see Canada as a key growth area,” Barbara Spicek told CDN prior to the announcement April 10.
It’s been more than two years since the Symantec sell off of Veritas to the Carlyle Group, and Spicek, who was handed the keys to the channel program six months ago, said she believes the redesign is going to make it easier for partners to become more profitable. Built into this new program, she said, is an easier way for partners to calculate their earnings and back-end rebates. Partners now have the flexibility to choose a variety of new accreditation courses and skills evaluations, based on their business practices. Spicek said the ongoing focus on cloud among its channel partners, especially hybrid cloud, hasn’t waned. In fact, it’s intensified.
“Within our large enterprise space we definitely still have a lot of on-prem customers using hybrid strategies … we’re working with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM because we hear a lot of our customers almost none of them work with just one cloud vendor, most are working with multi cloud solutions,” she said, emphasizing the importance of multi-cloud strategies.
New hardware and software resellers, MSPs and professional services are expected to join the program, she adds, because of Veritas’ push to attract the smaller market. Small to mid-market-sized business often approach their IT needs from a budget perspective rather than a product perspective, so the Veritas is building new revenue streams for partners targeting those smaller pockets of business. Partners selling to these accounts will have opportunities to get increased compensation and technical assets, she explained.
“It was always my aim, to get our partners on board with driving towards change – help them on this journey and help them evolve those models … and this is step one of the program’s major changes and you’ll see even more in the coming years,” said Spicek.
The program revamp is the right move, suggested Angelo Sciascia, senior vice president for NetX.
“Today’s announcement reaffirms Veritas’ commitment to the channel and transforms the program into one that is simple, predictable and profitable, while increasing the ease of doing business with Veritas,” said Sciascia in a statement. “I’m excited about the new Partner Force program and the company’s ability to drive continued customer innovation, satisfaction and value around data management and data protection.”
