FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
where they make their money, earn their
stripes and their value.
How would you summarise
the benefits of working in the
channel as oppose to using
sales representatives?
Channel is all about scale. If we’ve got 55
people, 25 of which sit internally outside
the region and the rest on-ground,
we couldn’t possibly reach all of those
customers. So, we need channel for scale,
credibility and because some of them have
been here for 50 years – they’ve already
formed relationships. We absolutely
couldn’t develop that in nine years.
What are some of the emerging
trends you see in the channel?
I think consolidation with channel partners
– how long can they still sell hardware
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT
TECH CHANNELS
Issue 27
We question whether
the customer has our
back, whether we have
theirs, and whether we
can trust each other in
a transaction.
for. Every channel partner you speak to
is talking about recurring revenue. Some
of them are behind the curve and they
have to try and pull that up, and some of
them won’t get there. Some of them are
traditional hardware sellers, traditional
negotiators. The bigger ones have seen a
lot and are developing services, practices,
cloud practices and I think those are the
ones that’ll survive. I always say when I see
a channel partner; with the advent of AWS
and Azure in-country, do you gage that as
an opportunity or a threat to your business?
The ones that say opportunity have evolved.
Which regions do you see offering
the most opportunities in the
channel for Veeam?
Saudi Arabia is on an absolute boom. The
government is investing a lot of money, the
country’s transforming, we see probably
60% of our revenue coming just from Saudi
Arabia. This wasn’t the case in the past, but
it looks very good going forward. Then you
look at the market in Qatar which is growing
enormously for us. Those are the ones we’re
backing where there’s lots of activity and
lots of spend.
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