Peter McKay, the Co-CEO & President of Veeam reveals his hand at the 2018 Partner Summit.

CHICAGO – Veeam Software Co-CEO and President Peter McKay admits he’s not that much of a poker player. But, the hand he’s been dealt by the Baar, Switzerland-based vendor has enabled him to go all-in.

“This is the opportunity in 2018: the competitive landscape is in disarray and the market is hyper-critical. We think we have the best hand with people & culture, platform, market position, partnerships and financial strength,” he told the 2,200 solution provider executives at the 2018 Partner Summit as part of the VeeamON conference.

McKay described this market position as a land grab for channel partners. “We are going to break out because we have all the cards and we are all-in.” At stake is a $7 billion market opportunity, but there is a sense of urgency partners should have especially in the next 10 to 12 months.

He added that if your partner business is not growing at 40 per cent it means some other partner is taking your share.

McKay’s ace in the hole card – so to speak – may be Veeam’s Hyper-Availability Platform for managing data in a self-sufficient way. Hyper-Availability includes backup and recovery with replication and failover for apps and data across any cloud.

According to McKay, Hyper-Availability is a new category for the vendor for critical data and its being positioned to look across three dynamics of the market: data is more critical for driving business and innovation, the customer experience and actionable data.

“Data is in hyper sprawl and it’s not sitting in the data centre. They are at end points and in places and things connected to the Internet. The need for data has to be predictable for things and compliance issues like GDPR. Data moves to a new state of intelligence that will anticipate needs of the employees and customers. We want to be a trusted provider of the new expectation of data,” he said.

Gartner’s enterprise software forecast for Hyper-Availability sees the market for Cloud IaaS at $89 billion with a 24.6 compound annual growth rate (CAGR), while backup and recovery is at $7 billion with a 5.2 CAGR for the second quarter of 2017.

The strategy behind the push for Veeam Hyper-Availability will be based on four areas including the company’s alliance partners and solution providers.

Danny Allan, the Canadian-born vice president of product strategy, outlined those four areas focused on multi-cloud around Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud and service providers in the channel.

For Azure, Veeam is building on top of Veeam Recovery for Azure.

In AWS, Veeam acquired IaaS data protection vendor N2WS and developed a new solution for Amazon DynamoDB and DR options for Amazon Aurora.

Veeam will be adding new Agents to IBM Cloud to protect data across enterprise hybrid environments. Veeam is now offering it as a managed service for IBM Global Technology Services group along with joint business partners who are reselling Veeam on the IBM Cloud.

Finally, the Veeam Cloud Service Providers are now at 18,900. This section has grown 36 per cent, according to Allan, and 2,000 of these companies have now opened new licenses for new solutions such as Agents for Office 365.