We're here at VeeamON 2017 and I'm speaking with Andy Vanderbilt, who's the VP of Strategic
Alliances.
How are you doing today?
I'm good.
Thank you.
Can you tell me a little bit about your role as VP of Strategic Alliances?
Yeah, so I've been with Veeam about 18 months now.
I run an organization that's responsible for managing our relationships with our largest
partners, technology partners, so, you know, VMware, Microsoft, HPE, Cisco, NetApp, etc.
And then we also have lower level of partnerships with other partners that have made commitments
to Veeam and that we've made commitments back to them, but the relationship isn't quite
a global strategic alliance.
So we run this whole organization.
Some of it's a little bit programmatic for some of the lower level partners and then
more of a direct managed relationship with our strategic alliance partners.
And during the keynote today, they talked about some of your relationships with Microsoft
and obviously VMware is a big partner as well.
Can you tell me more about the partnerships related to the announcements today?
Well, yeah, so, you know, our business got started backing up Veeam's.
So we necessarily had a relationship with VMware.
And you know, the relationships expanded over time and vendors, activities and initiatives
around virtual machines increased over time.
So you saw Microsoft get into the market with Hyper-V as another hypervisor to, you know,
sort of a corollary to VMware.
And you know, these virtualization platforms are the things that we, you know, get up every
day and think about and protect.
And so these relationships with VMware and with Microsoft are essential to our business.
You know, we had a few announcements today, we'll have a few more announcements.
I would say our relationship with Microsoft is growing from not just backing up virtual
machines through Hyper-V but also becoming extremely important around Azure and cloud
because, you know, as customers are moving their workloads from on-premise to cloud or
hybrid or private cloud, I mean, there are a bunch of different consumption models.
We need to accommodate that customer consumption.
The customer will decide the consumption.
We just need to be able to accommodate it and to back it up and to protect that data
and make sure that it's available to the business when it needs it.
And what about like your storage partners?
I know they talked about AWS a little bit in the keynote, but I guess NetApp is another
one, right?
Well, NetApp and HPE and Cisco with their SRE storage.
We announced also today the universal API that we'll be releasing with our version 10.
We collaborated with IBM and Lenovo and Infinite that to develop that API.
So we have a strong group of storage vendors.
The ones in the market that you see, you know, as the leaders in storage.
Some of those relationships are a little more intense than others at different points
in their maturity, and that's fine, but, you know, these relationships are critical to
our success because, you know, that's where data protection plays.
And you know, we're starting to see other partners emerge like a pure storage.
We had a very good, we still have very good relationship with Nimble, which was acquired
by HPE.
So now we've got this great relationship with HPE that includes the Nimble component of
that business.
And you know, in these relationships that we just continued to develop and to expand
on, there will be other partnerships that we'll put in place that may or may not be
storage vendors.
They may be other adjacencies as we develop our corporate strategy.
But, you know, it really has started with VMware and Microsoft and then with the storage
vendors.
And do you see any more partnerships starting with now that you're supporting Linux and
more physical computers as well as just the virtual?
Do you think that's going to expand your partnerships?
I think that, yeah, I think that does give rise to the potential for expanding out into
partnerships that we haven't had in the past.
I think that as well as, you know, we're seeing things with GDPR, the data protection requirements
in Europe that span not just data protection, but security, right?
So that's going to necessarily create a need for us to have relationships with security
vendors, things that we haven't had in the past.
So I think there are a few different categories of partners that we haven't had traditionally,
but, you know, we'll need to have a relationship with them.
I would also say, you know, as we move up further and further into the enterprise segment,
which is a very high focus area for us, you see that a lot of growth in the company coming
from that segment of the market, you know, relationships with systems integrators who
are the trusted advisors in those enterprises is a category of partnerships that we need
to build out further.
So I think, you know, we've got a lot of strong partnerships around storage and around, you
know, hypervisor and around, you know, the cloud providers, but there are also some other
areas where we're going to have to start to focus a little bit more as well.
Well, great.
Well, thanks for taking the time to speak with VMBlog and I wish you well for the rest
of your show.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me here.
