Transcript
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This is our latest session of VDC for me. Today, we're going to be talking about what Veeam Data Cloud has in store for VCSPs. My name is Michael Poole. I'm a Veeam Data Cloud Solution Engineer here at Veeam. I focus on Microsoft 365 and Entra, and joined by my wonderful co-host, Hin, if you want to introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Hin Tang, and I am a Veeam User Group Leader for both Cloud City and for Canada. I work at a VCSP in Canada doing Cloud Solutions Architecture, and I am personally very excited about this session, specifically about VDC or VCSPs, and I'm very, very happy to have Jochen with us to give us some of his insights. Jochen, if you introduce yourself. Hello. My name is Jochen Meixner. I work for T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom in Germany. We are a big VSCP in Germany and supporting the whole Veeam portfolio, and since this year, we are doing services with VDC. I am a consultant for many years in the data protection area, and works in, I think, 10 years with Veeam products. Thank you for that. That's a long anecdote for everyone, so I've known Jochen for a good few years now, and he's my tape guru, knows more about tape that he's forgotten than I ever knew. Well, thank you for joining us today, Jochen. Just to kick things off, I mean, talking about VCSPs, and when we think about the service provider world, we think data centers, hosting, that kind of thing, but I understand that's something T-Systems have done in the past for many of your customers. Now, what were some of the key drivers behind T-Systems changing that model and offering Veeam Data Cloud for your customers, as opposed to building and deploying your own platform? Okay. We are not changing the model. We are adding the model. We will remain in the business of own data centers, and public and private data centers, but we will add the cloud services to our portfolio, and our customers are demanding more and more cloud service and software as a service, and so it's my opportunity to expand my backup services into this area. Yeah, that's a great point there. I like how you've said, and, instead of changing, because fundamentally, it doesn't need to be a one or the other, does it? You've already got all these services. You're not going to throw all of them out and just go full Veeam Data Cloud necessarily, so that's great. Thank you. It's one of those things that's nice with the flexibility of choice here, normally, a customer, whether they want to purchase and deploy on their own, whether they want to have a service provider. Historically, there's always been this focus on you're on your own, if you're just buying the software, then people work with service providers, so here, you're also working for a service provider. How do you find supporting customers in this way with their journey? Because you've, just like Jochen, got your own on-prem services, haven't you? Yeah, and traditionally, that has been the VCSP role in providing that extra, well, number one, to be able to provide the infrastructure that a lot of small, medium companies can't provide themselves, but also providing that expertise and some of the hand-holding. I'm curious, Jochen, how is this decision-making working for T-Systems? How are you presenting this to customers? Or I guess, on the other hand, how are customers requesting, what are they specifically requesting that VCSP is fulfilling for them? Okay, so as I said, we are offering several services, and we will keep and expand the Cloud Connect and backup for 365, too, but we will offer the VDC in addition. So, the VDC is a good opportunity for us to support smaller customers in the first time who don't want to build an own infrastructure. And it's good for us, too. We don't need an infrastructure for each customer. So, this is perfect to support many customers, because it's easy. Yeah. Was that, would you say, one of the key drivers behind adopting Veeam Data Cloud? Or were there other key influencing factors that made you choose Veeam Data Cloud? Because, again, historically, you've deployed all of these services in-house. So, what made you decide to also launch Veeam Data Cloud? I'm just interested in that. So, as I said, the main driver behind this is it's easy to set up. You have a predefined environment. You don't need to build an own infrastructure. You can concentrate on bringing services to your customers and not to maintain the infrastructure. So, concentrate on consulting the right backup concept to the customer and not maintaining service. Thank you. Sorry, again. Yeah, no, I was just curious, Jochen, sort of on that subject. What are you guys finding is the most popular VDC products that you guys are, that your customers are launching on? Because you did mention VCC, which you're still keeping, and VB365, which you're still keeping in-house. But VDC, I know, does offer, as you said, this easy deployment for smaller customers. Most customers are interested in the M365 backup. But I think this is the reason, because this is the service we are offering the most, this is the first service we are offering. The other VDC services are following now, but there's interest from customers too. But the M365 is the biggest one. So, carrying on a bit of a tangent here, we're talking about it's been easy to deploy and support these customers. And it's great from a technical standpoint, but when it comes to being a service provider, on the one hand, you've got the technical and the art of the possible and wanting to deliver the best solutions you can. And on the other hand, there's the commercial that says, how do we offer this in something that is financially sustainable? How do we make up money as an organization? So, when you think about Theme Data Cloud versus using, say, Beam Cloud Connect and self-hosting, it's kind of the equivalent of a lot of organizations where they look at a private data center or cloud versus public cloud. And by this, I mean, you end up either with, say, a CapEx expenditure or an OpEx expenditure. So, I'm curious, how was the change in financing of it kind of seen by the business? Instead of saying, right, we're going to go and buy all this server, storage, networking, et cetera, upfront, we're going to now do more of a subscription consumption model. How did the business kind of react to that? Okay. We have own data centers. So, we are able to maintain an own infrastructure for this. But as I said, for many customers or for new customers and not some smaller customers, it's much easier to use the cloud-based service because the environment is there and scale it. So, this is much easier than to build up this for each customer on your own. And the company is happy because it's a pure OpEx model and they don't have to buy more servers, more infrastructure. And that's exactly it. And I appreciate you're thinking here as well, going from a history of being a service provider, going from purchasing racks and all the storage and trying to pre-plan that capacity, track growth, and always be asking for the next pay packet of we need to get more investment. How do you yourself see it? I'm not going to ask for confidential forecasting information here, but it is that thing of that pre-planning and trying to stay ahead. I'm just interested how you guys find it. Yeah. No, absolutely. I agree with what Johan was saying because that is a major, I guess, day-to-day work to maintain and to track and to make sure you're not running out of storage, make sure you're not running out of compute. And also, I think as another example with VDC for Salesforce, that's something that we're definitely looking at because of the fact that we don't have that infrastructure built. We don't really have the expertise there. So, if a customer comes and says, hey, do you guys back up Salesforce? We can then offer that right away and say, yes, we do. And then look into reselling the VDC product and then supporting them on that. So, yeah, definitely. I find that it's definitely filled a need that's out there. And yeah, and again, that's why I was very interested in Johan's first-hand experience of deploying this and any of the lessons that he may have learned through this. And I think you hit on a key point there around the expertise because, I'm going to quote Rick Van over here because he's always kind of saying this one that the Veeam experience can be like riding a bike. It depends on how good your bike is and how good the terrain is. And I think sometimes when you're potentially newer to architecture, a particular type of technology, backing up virtual machines and physical servers, you're typically in control of the compute, the storage, the networking planes. And you know that if it needs to go faster, there's a bottleneck that you can change, whether that's upgrading 10 gig NICs to 25 gig or whether that's moving from some spinny disk to full NVMe, there's always a component that you can accelerate further. When you move to the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft 365, suddenly you're working with SaaS applications and you're working with APIs and trying to protect that data in a cost-effective and performant way. I think sometimes having to quickly how to deploy it can be quite frightening to some of these cloud providers. And when you've then got customers demanding long retention periods, if you've, dare I say, mis-architected that and it's not an optimal design, but then you need to retain that for many years, that can be really painful as well, can't it? So I think just that element of reducing risk is quite important there. So Johan, another question for you. So you've onboarded to Veeam Data Cloud as a Veeam Cloud Service Partner. How did you find the kind of time to market there? I'm not, again, asking for confidential business plans, but we've already kind of touched on CapEx versus OpEx, you know, thinking about lead times for designing infrastructure, procuring that, deploying it, implementing service versus Veeam Data Cloud. How did you find that time to market experience? It was rather straightforward. We adopted the VDC for M365 rather early, and the VCSP processes at Veeam were not ready at this time. So we had to, we had some issues we had to solve in this time, but now after the roadmap is clear and the VCSP is supported, it's rather straightforward and it's no problem to onboard new customers or new services. Some of the VDC services are not VCSP ready at the moment, but we have agreements with sales now, so we can offer it. Fantastic. I refer with him because you can offer services for applications you are not that experienced in, or you don't have own infrastructure for, like Salesforce. Yeah, it's the same for us, like for you, but with the VDC, we are able to offer it and support it. Absolutely. And, you know, we're familiar with customers directly having that support mechanism. If they've got questions, they can ask support, they can speak to a Veeam account rep, but Veeam has always been supporting the service partners as well. So as you know, not only is it the, okay, Veeam Data Cloud, I've got the architecture taken care of, but you also know that you've always got those resources at Veeam to lean on. So, you know, fun fact for the audience here, obviously, Jochen, you mentioned about the onboarding and the processes in place. You and I had quite a few conversations as part of that onboarding, didn't we? And making sure that it was going to be the right, you know, identity and everything else for that platform. So yeah, never alone as a service partner. Veeam's always got your back no matter what that consumption model is. So we've already kind of touched on it a bit, but something I'm curious of is how do you, and this might seem a bit of a loaded question, how do you see your, you know, service portfolio evolving with, you know, the capabilities of Veeam Data Cloud? Do you potentially see yourself offering Veeam Data Cloud first and then step into more of the on-prem private data center when a customer requires that? Do you see yourself offering private first and Veeam Data Cloud to support? It's not a, I'm not going to hold you to it, but it's just interesting to see the mind of how you're seeing your internal teams and things such as, you know, the sales department and IT support, what their kind of preferences are looking like as that shapes up. I think this depends on the customer. It always will. The customer's got to come first with everything at the moment. Some are open to cloud services with no problem, and many of our customers are with some security restrictions, so they are not very cloud-affine at the moment. For these customers, we would offer the private services first, but if he has MW365, so it would be just equal for him, and I think then I would offer the VDC service first, just to get discovered fast and not to get faster the service. Makes sense. You know, Veeam did some research about a year or so ago, and we were asking the market anonymously about SaaS and how to protect it, and over 80 percent of the audience responded that they would look for a backup as a service offering to protect SaaS, which is huge because ultimately means that, you know, these customers out there, they don't want to do it alone. They want to do it with a direct consumer of Veeam Data Cloud or with a service partner, you know, offering Veeam Data Cloud or with the license you think on here and a traditional VCSP model. I think a lot of the customers out there are starting to realize that there is a shared responsibility model. Suddenly, I've got to protect this data, and we have already discussed about, you know, these different technologies and not always being exactly how to architect them the best way from day one, and then for the poor customers that are actually trying to run a day-to-day organization and do that, the stresses are even larger, so you can absolutely see where that take-up potential exists because you become a trusted advisor, don't you? So, one thing I would be curious about, Johan, is, you know, so you've gone that journey, you've got Veeam Data Cloud, and if you could go back to day one of planning for a VCSP service, and I don't just mean Veeam Data Cloud, I mean VCSP in general, is there anything you'd do differently? It can be about Veeam Data Cloud, it can not be. I'm curious as to the lessons learned along the way. More time. So, designing and developing new offerings is my main job. So, this was very fun for me because these are not the first cloud-based offerings, but it was a special one with a predefined environment from Veeam and not our own. So, it was straightforward, only the issues with the early stage of the product were to solve, so this was okay. And, okay, I think if you do it a second time, then there are some things you could do more efficient, but fundamentally, I don't see any major things I would do differently. So, it's okay. I could imagine some features I am missing at the moment, but I think the next versions, they will come. Of course. Now, I personally have got one last question. I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to ask, but from my perspective, were there any unexpected business outcomes, and this can be positive or negative or just unexpected neutral, that you've kind of uncovered on that journey to Veeam Data Cloud? No. Everything has gone as expected. The only thing is, but it's not an unexpected outcome, I have two customers that have asked if there will be more VDC services in the future, but especially they asked for service now. We see for service now. So, customers wanted more and more products, which, let's be honest, that sounds like the easiest upsell in history, then, when customers are telling you how they want to spend their money. You're going to kick me after this call and ask for service now, aren't you? You're doing a feature request now. Well, that was all the questions that I had hidden. Is there anything else you wanted to ask? No, just to add on to what Johan was saying, it's great to hear the requests from the customers, because that's the thing, right? That's what we listen to. That's what we use to determine where we're going to go in the future. So, for this vodcast and also future ones, it's good to know that those are requested, because hopefully they will become products and we'll talk about them on future shows. But also, I guess I'm curious about sort of going all the way back to the beginning to your question, Michael, about if you were to design again. So, Johan, I'm curious about how the conversations went at the beginning with the company, with the sales team, to sort of make this decision to add BDC, in your words, to add and not to sort of replace your service offerings with BDC. Were there any sort of pushback from anyone or any questions that needed to be answered before you guys went down that path? No. At this time, we had a customer with around 400 users who wanted to have an M365 backup rather fast. So, this was the perfect opportunity to push the BDC. It was the perfect time and the perfect offering for this. And now it's in our portfolio, so now no one questions us. Well, again, it was a customer requesting that sort of was the catalyst for you guys going to BDC. Okay. Very interesting. I was looking at this before this, but this was the perfect opportunity to get it. And sometimes that's what it takes, isn't it? Just that commercial, an organization I worked at before. You know, if you tried to get something through the legal engine, it would take two, three months. The moment there was a big deal going on, all the red tape was just cut for immediately and you found the right person and everyone could give you the answer. And suddenly, what would take months would take days. And that's fantastic there. So, hopefully, that really helps you with your case. The whole company was busy for this, to get the official offering for this. Well, that is it. We think about onboarding to the data cloud and the easy part is signing up, let's be honest. The easy part is onboarding customers. But there are the commercial implications in the background and what the company is agreeing to and formulating that market strategy and everything else around that, which can take time, can't it? So, some of these things don't go away by consuming a service such as Veeam Data Cloud, but ultimately some things do, such as what we discussed, that kind of CapEx investment requirement, the ability to have to design all the architecture, do the implementation, the installations to get ready to onboard customers. So, it can't be the complete business engine, but it certainly can help. So, well. But you are right, this was the heaviest part, the legal part. My company is a rather big one and the processes, you have to go through many processes to get an offering to the customers. But we got it in record time this time. So, it was good. Amazing. And now you've got the template that future customers can just follow, which the first one's always the hardest, as they say. Amazing. Well, I would just like to take a moment to say thank you for joining us today, Johan. It's been a real pleasure to sit down and have a chat with you about it and wishing you continued success with the BCSP program. And to the audience, thank you for joining us today. We will have another podcast around this time next month, where we'll be talking about another product within the Veeam Data Cloud platform. So, thank you everyone for joining us today and have a great day. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Johan. Thanks, Michael.
