 Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to VeeamON 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman, hashtag VeeamON, our second year of VeeamON coverage. This is day one. Kerry Stanton is here, he's the vice president of strategic alliances at Veeam. We're having a great conversation about it. Hockey, Cape Cod, but you know, we're golden retrievers. Golden retrievers, I love that. Hey, Dave, how many times do we travel the world and talk to a local? So, you know, Boston area guy. So well, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. And welcome to Boston. Yeah, a year and a half in Boston, right downtown, empty nesters. My two children are back doing university in Canada. Got a sophomore and a junior. And so my wife and I are living in Boston, empty nesters, it's awesome. That's great, you got to love it. And I love the fact that you're from Ottawa, but you're a Bruins fan. Yes, I've basically, I have turned into a Bruins fan. I'm a Red Sox fan, a Patriots fan. And the Celtics are in the playoffs. You better be if you're working for Peter McKay. Yeah, no, you have to. It's like you have to sign in. And I've worked for Peter for 17 years, three different companies. Wow, okay, so you were at VMware. I was at VMware, I was at Destone, and then we did IBM, and part of that was Watchfire, which we sold to IBM. So, long journey. So, give us the update. What's happening in Alliance? Yeah, so it's great. We have, as you know, we have our global reseller agreement that we announced with, most recently with NetApp, just in March, where we're now on their GPL. We went live on Cisco. We announced Cisco back in August, but we went live on November 15th. And we have HPE, and all three of them are just exceeding expectations as far as the demand and the interest that we're getting from our sellers. As you've seen from Peter and Veeam, we're targeted to the enterprise. We have our messaging around hyperavailability. And so these partners bring us a huge opportunity by working into their customer base. But we close 133 customers a day, right? You heard Peter mention that. But having, we're bringing them into our customer base, which is traditionally SMB and commercial, and we're working with them on their enterprise. But an exciting stat for that one is that we say no naked Veeam. When you sell with an Alliance partner, it's six to eight times larger than if we sell standalone. So it's working the messaging and the enablement that we have with our field. And we're 100% channel, so that's working very well on just the enablement with Jeff, Jeanette, Sean, and Olivier and Amiya. Well, the other thing that you guys seem to have done is figured out how to take a long view, a strategic view with these partners. Many organizations, they look for the tactical, okay, how much money we're going to make this year. You're looking at the lifetime value of a customer. It's frankly quite unique in this business. Well, the interesting thing we're doing, which is not just on the global resellers, which is on all of our partners, is that we look and say, what's a good partnership look like? Or what's the great partnership look like? And what we have is the investment that we are because we're private, is we'll do the front end investment upfront. We'll do a joint business plan, have shared metrics across the table. So whether that's with peer storage or with Nutanix, with our VMware, Microsoft, we front load all of those investments to your point. Is that we're not just waiting to see, did we have success year one, and then we'll invest year two. We take that three-year business case view upfront and do the front load investment. So what does that mean? That's a dedicated business development team. Like we have 25 people working and go to market with HPE, or 12 working with Cisco. And we take that from technical architects, field marketing, product marketing, and to make that entire pot. Kerry, I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a compare contrast. VMware would build one of the best, ecosystems out there. We've already talked once a day. For every dollar you spent on VMware, you did $15, $20 with the ecosystem. Veeam's nice vibrant ecosystem. Yes. Getting deeper with some of those partners. Give us a little bit of compare from your previous slide. Sure. So at VMware, no question that they had that solution. So we take that here as well and we call it the Veeam currency. So when you're going in and selling Veeam, if you're selling an average selling price of $10,000, we're working with our partners where they're seeing that that deal is going to turn into a $50,000 traditional with an alliance partner sale in conjunction with their hardware. So they're managing the entire software process. So they're seeing, they're up leveling the messaging. So no longer just pinpointing a hardware solution and they're increasing their average selling price by 10X. So Cisco is a great set. 10X, again, I'll repeat 10X with Veeam on doing those deals versus just trying to go in and sell hyperflex standalone. It's just a really critical time in the industry right now. Our research shows that there's a gap between what the business expects in terms of the degrees of automation, the level of quality of services and what IT is actually delivering. So that says the customer base is really ripe for churn in a lot of accounts. And so you guys being aggressive with partnerships with regard to making that investment as a private company, the timing frankly couldn't be better, especially as you go from what was a virtualized world where you guys did very, very well to now this cloud, multi-cloud, digital, throw out whatever buzzword you want, but we are at an inflection point. Yeah, we sure are. I think that what we're seeing with our partners, especially on HVE and Cisco and Nutanix, as they're all in their hyperconverged, and so they're going in a whole different sales motion. We're seeing it on our hybrid cloud. We're a number one coal cell partner with Microsoft. So we have our native backup to Azure. And so we're seeing this disruptive market in the marketplace. And we're also seeing a lot of our partners have competitive takeouts of, you know, Dell Avamar, right? And their data domain. So we're going in and taking out Dell Avamar, and they're going in in data domain. So we have a lot of synergy. And so as these traditional vendors such as Avamar, Veritas, Commvault, and the IBM Tivoli solution is that we have those sales motions going with our partners that are going after those hardware solutions. So it's again, it's very synergistic with our tier one partnerships. So you see a huge drive towards simplicity. I mean, the other thing you guys do really well is, and it sounds so simple, but you're compatible with a lot of different clouds, for example, a lot of, so more workloads, more environments increases your TAM and your friendliness to partners. I mean, it sounds simple, but execution is not. Yeah, we're a Swiss based company. We remain, you know, the Switzerland is that we work with all partners in all routes. And so we've seen a lot of success in that way. I mean, we're, we see a lot of demand coming from our customers wanting, our partners wanting to work with us in these multi-cloud solutions that we have with Microsoft. Biggest challenges, I mean, is it channel conflict, dealing with deal registration? I mean, what are some of the challenges you guys are facing? I think the challenge is just enabling our sales teams on how to work with these partners and to understand the sales motion. And some of our sales, our sales execs are 20 year veterans that have come in and worked in a traditional place where when you went out to tackle an enterprise deal you did that standalone. And we realize that, that we don't take any deals direct. So just getting them in the sales motion with our partners is a challenge, but one that is easily adopting to success that we're having in the field. All right, Kerry, I know you're super tight on time. We promise to get you out of here. So we got to leave it there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE live from Veeamon 2018.