As Veritas announces a revamped channel partner program called Veritas Partner Force, Channel Post speaks with Geoff Greenlaw, Senior Director, Head of Channel (Emerging region, EMEA) at Veritas about how the company has enriched its program with up-skilling and other technical assets. He also talks about creating new opportunities for partners to drive a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
What prompted you to revamp your partner program?
Our previous partner program was security focussed, owing to a 10 year relationship with Symantec until 2016. Now that Veritas is an independent company, we decided to recreate the entire program to be focussed on our core competencies so that partners can drive better profitability and growth from it. We also wanted our partner program to be uniform for all partners and not dependent on whether they are offering products and solutions to enterprise or mid-market segment.
What are the key features of your new partner program?
The new Veritas Partner Force program has been designed to increase the profitability of partners. It stands on 5 key pillars to offer partners with a program that is simplified, predictable, measurable, rewarding and better aligned with mutual growth goals. What this essentially means is that we have made all aspects of this program more transparent. In this line, we have introduced Growth Accelerator Rebate (GAR) program that informs partners about their earnings on any given product even before closing the deal. In order to incentivize our partner community to align with the company’s future goals, we also offer better incentives to partners that focus on new and emerging technologies. The new partner program offers a number of educational offerings that further strengthen our partner community to offer solutions that can address our customers’ business concerns.
How do you enable partners to capitalize on the opportunities?
There are a number of ways in which we enable our partners for growth, key among which is educating and up-skilling them. Since we are encouraging partners to concentrate on new technologies, we educate our existing partners on such technologies, and their advantages. We are also investing in upgrading the skill-sets of partners by offering training to them either in our own training facilities in UAE or by leveraging our distribution partner network to conduct training sessions in other countries. All such trainings are provided free of cost to the partners across the region.
Besides training our partners, we also certify the qualified partners with sales and technical certifications, namely VSE+ (Veritas Sales Expert) and VCE (Veritas Certified Engineer), to address our customers’ needs. VCE certification is offered as a paid technical accreditation. These training and certification enable partners to tap into new market opportunities.
What do you look for when scouting for new partners?
I will make a very bold statement here – between 30 to 50 per cent of our current partners will not be Veritas partners in 2 years’ time. Why I say that is because as technology is evolving, we want to work with partners who are interested in or have the ability to work with new technologies. What we are looking for are a new breed of partners that are born in the cloud, essentially resellers who have the ability to take multiple products and build solutions that fit our customers’ data management challenges. We are also looking at partners that can offer value-added services, over and above what their vendor’s technology is offering.
Any message that you would like to deliver to your partners?
With the new partner program, we strive to make it easier for partners to access sales resources that can help them learn more about our latest technologies. We will continue to introduce new features to our partner program, which will help partners offer better assistance to their customers.
We are adding new partners to our ecosystem every week and urge current and prospective partners to take advantage of not only Veritas’ robust portfolio of data management solutions but also the increased revenue opportunities that this revamped program has to offer.
