At the end of January, Technology Reseller caught up with Oliver Norman to discuss his first 10 months at secure multi-cloud data management leader Veritas Technologies.
At the time of our meeting, Norman was VP of Channel & Alliances, EMEAI. Since then, following significant growth in partner revenues and market expansion, he has been promoted to Regional Vice President for UK & Ireland and DACH, with responsibility for all elements of the UKI and DACH regional sales teams.
He takes on this new role at an interesting time for Veritas which on February 8 announced that Cohesity, a leader in AI-powered data security and management, intends to combine with Veritas’ data protection business, which will be carved out of Veritas, marrying Cohesity’s speed and innovation
with Veritas’ scale, global presence
and installed base to create a $1.6 billion turnover business with 10,000 customers and a 3,000-strong global partner network.
The combined company will continue to develop all Cohesity products and services plus the Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup appliances and Alta data protection platform, while working towards the delivery of an integrated solution combining the best technology from both companies. The remaining assets of Veritas, including its InfoScale, Data Compliance and Backup Exec businesses, will be incorporated into a separate company, DataCo.
This is clearly a momentous change for Veritas and Cohesity that has
the potential to help customers of both organisations address the data management challenges highlighted by Norman in his conversation with Technology Reseller, such as ensuring cyber resilience, taking back control of cloud environments and gaining impactful insights from data.
This piece was written before the announcement of the merger with Cohesity and the formation of DataCo, but the points raised by Norman, and the opportunities for channel partners of both new entities still apply. The players may be different, but the song remains the same.
Veritas Technologies has been active in the data management space for 40 years, operating very much as a channel-first business – around 95% of its business goes through the channel, even more in EMEA and India – with a strong focus on its NetBackup family of enterprise backup and recovery solutions.
As part of its vision to become the number one data management company for multi-cloud, it has updated its product offering over the last two years, launching a cloud data management platform, Alta, in October 2022 and in October 2023 introducing 360 Defense, a comprehensive blueprint for data protection, cyber resiliency and restore.
The former expands its offering with cloud-native capabilities, helping Veritas punch into the cloud market; the latter provides an ecosystem of certified partner solutions from the likes of Microsoft, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Qualys, Semperis and Symantec by Broadcom.
“We’ve got a REDLab environment where we can put our products and those of our partners and let loose all the horrible viruses and malware out there to test those products and our interoperability with them,” explains Norman
He adds that the idea is to position Veritas as much more of a turnkey solution, incorporating a wider ecosystem benefitting customers’ cyber resiliency.
“The challenge that our customers have is that if you’ve got multiple products that aren’t necessarily integrated or interoperable it increases the attack surface through which cyber criminals can access customers’ data and business operations. By making sure everything’s more integrated, we help customers derive greater value from our solutions.”
Key differentiators
This builds on the capabilities that Veritas has developed over the last 40 years across the whole data management spectrum.
“To give you a couple of examples: with our governance and recovery solutions we enable customers to protect their data and maintain immutable data that they lock away. An analogy might be having a safe in your house for watches or jewellery so that if someone comes into the house your high value possessions will be secure.
The trouble is you’re not going to be able to wear that watch or piece of jewellery if it’s impossible to reach. Our differentiator is that we provide solutions that are safe and air-gapped so people can’t get to the data, but which are also accessible so you are able to restore and start your business up again if necessary.
“It takes 73 days for a typical organisation to understand they’ve been attacked and then do something about it. So, for business continuity, having these capabilities and being able to restore, protect and govern data is vitally important.”
Another differentiator, Norman suggests, is Veritas’ ability to scale-up
in a cost-effective way at a time when organisations are generating, and being required to store and protect, ever greater volumes of data.
He adds that the combination of rising data volumes and Veritas’ new capabilities is driving demand for Alta and the company’s core NetBackup and hardware appliances portfolios.
“With everything I’ve just talked about around cyber resiliency, having integrated solutions and having that scale, combining our software in a turnkey appliance is very attractive in terms of its performance, its scale, price points and all those sorts of things.”
Big growth drivers include governance and compliance, for example the need to record, store and potentially access, phone calls, mobile calls, video calls and chat, especially in financial services, and data analysis, whether it be to identify and flag up unusual behaviour for compliance purposes or to gain competitive advantage through better insights and decision-making.
“Our success goes back to that analogy of the safe. It’s about having immutable data management for storage and having the ability to restore data quickly. The third thing is being really strategic in the way we impact cost across an organisation.
For example, our NetBackup software allows us to dedupe data, so customers aren’t storing data that’s not needed. Customers look at that total cost of ownership, not just for what they’re buying from Veritas, but for their whole ecosystem and spend within other areas that might get impacted.”
In this context, Norman says organisations are looking much more closely at which workloads to put in the cloud and which to bring back to a private data centre.
“The other thing we’re seeing is data sovereignty becoming a big thing, particularly in Europe. Government organisations want to keep data on French soil or German soil and for it to be managed by resident companies. That’s a great opportunity for partners who are providing managed services and an area where we see lots of growth and opportunity.”
Norman adds that the size of the market opportunity for partners is reflected in their growing participation in enablement training.
“If you go back a few years, it was always a challenge to get partners certified, but today the doors have been knocked off with partners wanting to get the latest skill sets and capabilities in this space. One reason is the launch of Alta, which has a brand-new set of capabilities; the other is simply growing demand from customers.
Partner programme
Norman, who joined Veritas in April last year, says one of the things he likes most about the company’s partner programme is that it links directly to the company’s overarching priorities, which are cloud, net new logos and more segment four and five customers.
These are businesses that partners deal with directly without any involvement from enterprise sales representatives within Veritas.
“If those customers become really successful, then we will promote them up through our customer tiering – we have customer tiering and we have partner tiering.”
On the partner side, Veritas has four levels of partner – Platinum, including six in the UK; Gold; Silver; and Registered– and two distributors (Arrow and TD SYNNEX) that bring in and manage the partner community on behalf of Veritas.
“Our ecosystem is growing on two fronts. One is around the technology partnerships we have with the likes of Microsoft, CrowdStrike and others in the 360 Defense area; the other is through distribution.
That’s the source of lots of new partners that are coming through, some of which have been born in the cloud and have more of a security perspective than a storage-type background. That’s a trend that we’re seeing and it’s quite likely that within the next few years one of those partners will become a Platinum partner.”
Perhaps because of this, Norman adds that Veritas is also doing more business through marketplaces, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google.
“The whole marketplace way of transacting, for customers to be able to draw down on their commitments to cloud service providers and for those organisations to be able to transact those private offers quickly, is becoming much more prevalent. At Veritas, we don’t have any preference. We just need to make sure it’s easy for customers and that it’s integrated into how partners get incentivised and rewarded, so all the incentives we provide to our partners are achievable through marketplaces and two-tier distribution.”
Broader customer base
He adds that over the last three years the distributor-led partner community has enabled Veritas to extend its customer base from its sweet spot in the enterprise space to more mid-market organisations propelled by incentives for net new logos and the success of products like Backup Executive, which backs up the Microsoft suite in the cloud.
In addition, Veritas also has long- standing relationships with global system integrators like Fujitsu and Kyndryl.
“With workloads moving to the cloud, workloads coming back from the cloud, customers adopting a one-in, one-out approach in terms of the vendors they work with, because of the amount of technologies they need to work together there’s a huge opportunity for the big SIs to make sure companies are getting value for money and that they’re getting interoperability across all systems.
We’re seeing growth both in that mid-market, being supported by resellers, and among bigger, more complex organisations that require a multinational approach to consolidate and bring together all their systems.”
In the meantime, Veritas will continue to develop its product offering and enhance its partner programme to ensure it maintains the right balance between change and continuity.
“We need stability in the way we work together because, with the investment partners make in us and the way they like to work with us, there has to be some level of continuity. You can’t flip from one year to the next,” says Norman.
No doubt, that will apply post-merger as well, given Cohesity’s long-term commitment to the Veritas product roadmap and the value it places on the company’s extensive partner ecosystem. Watch this space for more details in the coming months.
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