279 – Why Microsoft Sellers Are Ignoring Your Solution (And How to Fix It)

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In this insightful session, Vince Menzione is joined by Erika Irby of Veeam and Pat Primavera of Microsoft to discuss the evolution of their strategic partnership. They unpack Veeam’s transition from a “drinking company with a software problem” to a $2 billion enterprise aiming for $5 billion, revealing the tactical shifts in engineering alignment, sales play development, and co-sell activation that led to their landmark five-year agreement. Pat shares his framework for precision execution within the Microsoft ecosystem, while Erika details how Veeam leveraged “customer zero” strategies and internal alignment to drive success.

Key Takeaways

• Engineering alignment is the critical first pillar before attempting to execute go-to-market strategies.
• Successful co-selling requires specific packaged plays tailored to distinct seller roles like security specialists or ATSs.
• Alliance leaders and cloud sales leaders must be in the same room to create joint plans rather than doing internal selling later.
• Veeam’s commitment to Azure and aligning with Microsoft seller compensation was vital for their five-year agreement.
• Partners should act as “Customer Zero” by using tools like the Data Resilience Maturity Model on themselves first to prove value.
• The next major growth opportunity lies in Partner-to-Partner (P2P) collaboration to bundle solutions for the marketplace.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

Key Tags:

Veeam, Microsoft partnership, co-sell activation, ISV strategy, engineering alignment, precision execution, Veeam Data Cloud, Data Resilience Maturity Model, Azure commitment, partner-to-partner, P2P collaboration, channel marketing, sales plays, crossing the chasm, cyber resilience, agentic AI, customer zero, marketplace growth, alliance strategy, ecosystem transformation.

Ultimate Partner is the independent community for technology leaders navigating the tectonic shifts in cloud, AI, marketplaces, and co-selling. Through live events, UPX membership, advisory, and the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® podcast, we help organizations align with hyperscalers, accelerate growth, and achieve their greatest results through successful partnering.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Erika Irby: Kinda what you were talking about earlier about the, the idea of the channel is non-existent anymore, right? Like we’re, we’re all in this kind of universe of different entities and we all, you know, work together and orbit each other and compliment even, you know, frenemies. I mean, we look at them like, how can we learn?

[00:00:15] Erika Irby: How can we grow? You know, how can we be better?

[00:00:19] Vince Menzione: Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. We just came off Ultimate Partner, live at Carahsoft Training Center in Reston, Virginia.

[00:00:35] Vince Menzione: Over two days, we gather top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room, this episode brings you right to the edge of what’s next. Let’s dive in. We have another incredible group of another organization here, and this is a really great conversation point too. Maybe I kind of alluded to it.

[00:00:57] Vince Menzione: Um, you know, those who know me, when I started the podcast, I was actually doing individual consulting work, uh, before we got to do these events and really started to get front and center with the community in a big way. Uh, and Veeam was actually a client of mine back for several years. Um, so this is gonna be a really interesting conversation.

[00:01:17] Vince Menzione: Uh, so we have two incredible leaders gonna be joining me up on stage here. Uh, Eric, I guess I’m gonna introduce ’em, right. So, Erica Irby, who recently rejoined Veeam, who’s been on stage before at other ultimate partner events and is a sponsor for us, and Eric Irby, who leads the channel marketing organization.

[00:01:38] Vince Menzione: So taking Veeam, which is a large ISV, and making ’em front and center with the channel and the reseller community. And Pat Primavera, who I worked with at Microsoft, in fact, way back in the day, and his wife as well, who is now a leader in the ISV organization. We’re gonna have ’em go in the specifics of their roles, but having them join me on stage today.

[00:01:57] Vince Menzione: So welcome you both on stage. Come on up and join me. I feel like come on down. Come on now.

[00:02:08] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Thank you. So good to see you, pat. So great to have you here. It’s really great. So, um, yeah, so we are interesting. Great conversation by the way today. Uh, and it kind of flow, it’s kind of flowing into each other, right? ’cause we, we just had a couple of marketplace leaders up on stage talking about marketplace.

[00:02:27] Vince Menzione: And at one point people thought that it was ISVs directly selling to customers, right? And there’s this whole other world out there. Uh, when I was working with Veeam, um, there were some, uh. Pratfalls, I guess probably looking for the right word here. Uh, but things have really changed in the last several years.

[00:02:46] Vince Menzione: So first of all, Erica, maybe an introduction first to you and your new role. You were at Microsoft before this, but you were at being before that. So you boomerang back and then a leadership role. So take us through your, your role and your organization.

[00:03:00] Erika Irby: Yeah. Uh, we call it, uh, Veeam Ringing, er, everything at Veeam.

[00:03:05] Erika Irby: Uh, you have to have put Veeam in front of it, but, um, I started back at Veeam in 2014 and you had brought up earlier about, um, you know, when cloud. Was the new thing. And I remember very distinctly, um, attempting to get people to trust that they could put their backup in this nebulous thing called the cloud.

[00:03:25] Erika Irby: And, you know, it was pretty wild back then. Yeah. Um, but I, I had several roles and then I ended up, um, moving to Microsoft and my ex-boss is right over there. Yeah. Thank you so much. Um, and then Veeam had an opportunity for me to come back and, and run their America’s channel marketing, and I said, sure. And I have been on board now for th my second three months, and, um, I’m loving it.

[00:03:50] Vince Menzione: Very, very cool. Great to have you back again. And Veeam is, and Mark e sponsored the event as well. So really appreciate your support ultimate. Sir, uh, new role for you too, or fairly new. You’ve been around Microsoft. I’ll let you go through your history and

[00:04:06] Pat Primavera: background. Sure,

[00:04:06] Vince Menzione: sure.

[00:04:07] Pat Primavera: Uh, what Vince didn’t share when he introduced me is he actually enjoys working with my wife better than working with me.

[00:04:13] Pat Primavera: She, Kelly was an amazing, that’s leader. She was really great to work with. She’s doing great. She’s doing great. Uh, yeah, so Pat Primavera, uh, I’ve been with the company 16 years recently, came back to the ecosystem after doing some other things within Microsoft. I like to joke that I’ve completed my ecosystem Bingo card, where I’ve run distribution.

[00:04:32] Pat Primavera: I’ve run the reseller channel. I’ve run OEM. I ran our hardware business, hardware business for a while too. I got to ISB and, and my bingo card is complete. Nice, nice. Uh, but listen, it’s, it’s, I’m super excited. This is right in the growth and heartbeat of the company. Uh, it’s where transformation’s happening with great partners like Veeam.

[00:04:51] Pat Primavera: And so I, I wouldn’t want to be in any other place at Microsoft. And so there’s just a ton of opportunity for everybody in this room. Yeah.

[00:04:57] Vince Menzione: And you work with some amazing friends of ultimate partner as well? Uh, yeah. Your leader is, was a podcast guest and was up on stage at one of our events. One of our first, yeah.

[00:05:05] Vince Menzione: We, we

[00:05:05] Pat Primavera: worked with some of the most strategic ISVs in the ecosystem and so, um, you know, I have a, a portfolio of a lot of the, the partners that are driving the application and infrastructure modernization out there happening. And so it’s, it’s just, it’s a great time to, to be in the ecosystem together.

[00:05:21] Vince Menzione: So for those, I, I, you know, we, leaving out the audience, we’re, we’re gonna have a great conversation up here on stage, but I do wanna ask people like, how many of you actively working with Veeam or No, Veeam.

[00:05:32] Vince Menzione: Uh, so show of hands. So a lot of, a lot of organizations here. That’s really terrific. And then also working with Microsoft. I’m just gonna take the, like a lot of hands there, I’m just assuming. Right. So that’s, I I just thought I also like Gipping and we we’re all gonna dance a little bit later too, so I hope everybody’s up for that.

[00:05:47] Vince Menzione: So, uh, so great to have you both. I have a personal, like sit, you know, I worked with Veeam way back at, at a point when I was. Again, doing some consulting work and uh, it was an interesting time for Veeam. Veeam had been a top partner, Microsoft, um, and kind of fallen out of favor, I guess is probably the right term to use.

[00:06:10] Vince Menzione: A few years. It was a, that was a way back period of time, but then had a lot of learnings from that experience. And I thought today we would share some of those learnings. And one of the things I, I remember having some early conversations with Microsoft about Veeam. Veeam has an incredible pedigree of selling, not, not only moving all their technology to the cloud.

[00:06:30] Vince Menzione: ’cause originally it was on-prem and it was, it was in on boxes and all kinds of things. That was how, how backup and recovery was done, but also building out really a very vibrant channel. I, I don’t think I’ve seen many organizations quite candidly. That were as vibrant, building out the relationships, the level relationships.

[00:06:51] Vince Menzione: I remember talking to one leader, one of the top resellers in the market that everybody would know, and that person said, Veeam is my favorite partner. Like hands down by far. And I’ve seen that type, so I thought maybe we’d spend a little bit of time there. Why did that grow first? And then I think there were a lot of lessons learned from that ex from like that time.

[00:07:14] Vince Menzione: Like it always hurts. We all have to go through that process, right? We’re on top of the world. We get knocked down, knocked down a rung, and then we overcome and we, we achieve more. So maybe, I thought we’d start there. ’cause both of your perspectives on that.

[00:07:28] Pat Primavera: Yeah. Listen, as we think about a lot of the topics that have come up today, I mean, you’ve been talking about it almost every session, which is around data and.

[00:07:38] Pat Primavera: You start to get into not just data management, data security, cyber resilience. Yeah. Like it is mission critical. And so, you know, partnering with Veeam is absolutely huge for us because that’s the world of AgTech ai like that is core to what every customer needs to have a plan around. And so that’s where like partnering with them is just amazing because what we’re able to do is scale because of the channel aspect that you had mentioned.

[00:08:06] Pat Primavera: Yeah. And so we think across our segments. So while as Erwin mentioned earlier, we have verticalized enterprise industries, we also have horizontal scale. And what we love just around the V model is how we can effectively do that across all fronts. Because speed, as everybody knows right now, matters. And so the pace at which we’re able to move out with our partnership has just been tremendous.

[00:08:30] Pat Primavera: Yeah. So, um, you know, we’re seeing that growth, uh, jointly with Veeam. The engagement has never been better. Uh, and so she’ll highlight I think a little bit of the, it didn’t happen overnight.

[00:08:40] Vince Menzione: Yeah, it didn’t happen overnight. No. Take us through it.

[00:08:43] Erika Irby: Well, first of all, it’s kind of surreal for me to sit up here, right?

[00:08:45] Erika Irby: Because back when I first started being the first time, you know, we could hardly get Microsoft to like talk to us, right? We would like beg them to like come to a meeting and, but part of our issue in the very beginning was that. Our connection to them was simply that we sat on Hyper-V, we, we just sat on their product and we didn’t really have a, a strong message other than, look, I promise we’re super cool and we are in the stack, and, and you know, partners love us, customers love us, but we didn’t have that, that solid of a story.

[00:09:14] Erika Irby: And I do credit, you know, folks like you. S. Amazing people at Microsoft Veeam brought in some really solid leadership that knew that they had to work really hard to come up with a real story and to be very targeted about our solution plays and to, um, not only on the, the engineering side to be super integrated, but to have that field alignment to really get nitty gritty on like, this is how we’re gonna compensate.

[00:09:41] Erika Irby: This is how we’re going to help, this is how we’re gonna drive this. You know, you had mentioned like falling outta favor and I think it was more about Veeam had to definitely grow up a little bit. Um, we started off honestly just at the edge of technology. I mean, Veeam has always been an innovative leader.

[00:09:59] Erika Irby: If you read the book, crossing the Chasm, that is how Veeam. It follows that exact path. Yes. And, and Rap Mirror had had told we all had to read that book, by the way, when we first started. It’s a great book. Um, it is a great book and it, it really does talk about like those early adopters and we, we bet on that.

[00:10:15] Erika Irby: And so we had all of the makings of being an incredible company, and by the way, we will hit $2 billion at the end of this year and we have a goal to hit 5 billion in three years. We are not messing around. That’s really,

[00:10:26] Vince Menzione: that’s incredible. You really have taken up. But,

[00:10:28] Erika Irby: but it is because of that, that we’re able to be an a, a true.

[00:10:34] Erika Irby: Partner with Microsoft, we can help scale, we can, you know, drive these solutions into our market. And then, and really we have our own skin in the game, and then we’re providing our own value. I mean, obviously Microsoft is a behemoth, right? Yes. They, yes. They’re not gonna choose just anybody. And we take that seriously as a partner.

[00:10:52] Vince Menzione: So, um, I, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, but I do recall there were some, there were some pitfalls I wanna make, like I’m, I’m only gonna bring ’em up because I think people need to understand it, like. Uh, in the beginning there was this approach where we’re just gonna put every deal into partner center and some of ’em may not be Microsoft deals and we’re just gonna hope they’re all gonna land, uh, you know, gonna make us look good.

[00:11:15] Vince Menzione: ’cause we can get rewarded a certain way. That’s something you don’t do, by the way. And this was when Cracker, right? Oh yeah. So you’re the guy who runs the ISV business. So you could talk about like what to do, what not to do and then, uh, and then connecting the dots was a tough part. And there, maybe there weren’t tools then that there are, now we’re gonna have Jason Rook talk about marketplaces a little bit more.

[00:11:36] Vince Menzione: Erwin talked about it a little bit this morning, but, um, you know, it wasn’t, there wasn’t this cohesion between those big resellers that love Veeam by the, that one in particular, if that comes to mind, and how a seller gets paid. Yeah. Like there was a disconnect. Yeah, there was a big disconnect. So it felt like Veeam was operating in its own silo by itself.

[00:11:57] Vince Menzione: And hoping that putting stuff in partner center was gonna make them look good and the channel was operating differently down here. Like those three things weren’t connecting. Yeah.

[00:12:08] Erika Irby: I, I, I, again, I think, you know, we had to mature and we had to, um, also rethink our own, I think strategy. You know, Veeam plays across multiple.

[00:12:20] Erika Irby: Pieces of the market. We support storage partners, we compliment other security partners. We, um, you know, touch an ai like we’re, we have so many alliance partners. We have a slide that has all of our alliance partners, and it just looks like a mess because there’s, we’re like, oh yeah, we play with everybody, but I think we have a slide.

[00:12:39] Vince Menzione: Don’t we have a slide?

[00:12:39] Erika Irby: And, and it’s awesome, right? Like all of us. You know, kinda what you were talking about earlier about the, the idea of the channel is non-existent anymore, right? Like we’re, we’re all in this kind of universe of different entities and we all, you know, work together and orbit each other and compliment even, you know, frenemies.

[00:12:54] Erika Irby: I mean, by the way, we have a lot of respect. Like, I know Cohesity here, Rubrik, we look at them like, how can we learn? How can we grow? You know, how can we be better? And, and that’s, you have to kind of adopt that and change. Our co-founder, he, he’s gone to start another company, but he used to say that we were, um, a drinking company with a software problem.

[00:13:16] Erika Irby: And like that was kind of our mentality, which by the way, resellers that thought we were super fun. Yeah. We were freaking fun.

[00:13:22] Vince Menzione: Yeah. I

[00:13:22] Erika Irby: mean, super fun. I’ve seen

[00:13:23] Vince Menzione: some of the things you do. It’s crazy. We were known

[00:13:25] Erika Irby: for our veeam parties and things like that. Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Like we had to establish ourselves, but over time we also had to, you know, we wanna be taken seriously, then we have to be serious.

[00:13:35] Erika Irby: Yep.

[00:13:37] Pat Primavera: Yeah, I, I’d say especially as you get into where the rubber meets the road, and I’ll kind of dovetail this into to co-sell because I think this is what will be valuable for everybody here. ’cause everybody’s in different states of maturity. But the thing I loved about when I started to engage with Veeam, so I started in the spring and they cornered me at Von and were like.

[00:13:57] Pat Primavera: Yeah, it’s not working. How does this work? And it was the perfect timing because yes, I just come from my old role, which I had the accountability of taking all of our commercial solution areas and all the product and solution plays that get built, and then how do you land that across all of our thousands of sellers across workloads in the field.

[00:14:17] Pat Primavera: So that was my, that was my jam for the last couple years, is how does Microsoft do that at scale and consistency? Um, and so I was like. Okay. I know what to do. Um, and so it was great because they said it’s not working. We sat down at Beamon and we figured out what is our plan to go change and, and get to a world where we’re not talking about systems, we’re not talking about partner share, we’re talking about pragmatic ways that we’re gonna co-sell together and what does that look like?

[00:14:45] Pat Primavera: And so there’s a couple key pillars that, that we anchored on that we gotta get right. Number one was just around engineering alignment and they have done a great job. Aligning with our engineers. Yep. Uh, and our engineering leadership, uh, that has to be in place, uh, as partners. And the reason is, is the business is moving so fast that having those hooks into engineering matters from a product roadmap and build with perspective.

[00:15:11] Pat Primavera: Um, and so making sure those hooks were in place, number one. Um, and, and so that helps us around product strategy. The corporate strategy and where the partnership fits in.

[00:15:21] Vince Menzione: And that wasn’t there before.

[00:15:22] Pat Primavera: Right? The strategic partnership was, but the engineering piece had to get built. The

[00:15:26] Vince Menzione: engineering piece had to be built.

[00:15:27] Vince Menzione: Yes. Um,

[00:15:27] Pat Primavera: and what’s great at, at Microsoft right now is now more than ever, I am seeing our engineering leadership lean into our partners as executive sponsors, as participating in, in actual working meetings, resolving issues. I’ve never seen the level of leader engagement that I’ve ever seen as I do today.

[00:15:46] Pat Primavera: So that was number one. Number two was around GTM and sales play alignment. So one of the things that we talk about, and I see this with some partners, is, Hey, we’re working with your engineering team. I’m like, okay, that’s great.

[00:15:59] Vince Menzione: Yeah, what?

[00:16:00] Pat Primavera: That’s fantastic, but what are we gonna package up from a go to market and take and go sell together?

[00:16:06] Pat Primavera: And so really getting specific around what are the actual plays we’re gonna go run. Yep. Because that’s the way our sellers think they think in terms of packaged plays. And so getting the partners to understand, this was where Veeam was like, okay, right? So we sat down, we started talking about Veeam Data Cloud, okay?

[00:16:22] Pat Primavera: We broke it down by what’s the play? What’s the messaging and value prop to customers? Is there industry alignment that we need to prioritize around? And who are the sellers, right? Everybody says, oh, I need a Microsoft seller. Who are the sellers we’re gonna actually gonna go target? Ah, is it a security specialist?

[00:16:40] Pat Primavera: Is it a AI business solution specialist? It is an account technology strategist. Yeah. Who’s the right role that we can go jointly co-sell with that’s actually going to make this work. And then we got into the co-sell activation piece, which is, okay, great. Don’t tell me you’re great at everything. Where are the pockets of strength that we’re gonna go after?

[00:17:01] Pat Primavera: Yes. And we literally came up with a targeted set of accounts. It wasn’t a thousand accounts, it wasn’t 300 accounts, it was a smaller set of accounts that we targeted across several operating units. With strong sponsorship. And we went and went hard on those accounts and then we kind of came back as a team and said, what’s working well?

[00:17:21] Pat Primavera: What’s not working well? Is the messaging resonating? Do we want to tune it? Um, and so that’s the type of work that we’re doing. Can tell. It’s very tactical, but that’s how you make it work, in co-sell. And so that’s what I try and guide people to is get really specific prioritize. And then tweak and tune so you can move fast.

[00:17:41] Pat Primavera: And so they’ve just done a fantastic job. And we’re not saving month, you know, the talking to monthly business reviews, we’re literally meeting every Thursday.

[00:17:51] Vince Menzione: Yes, yes. And it’s

[00:17:52] Pat Primavera: a very tactical, we already have the strategy alignment. It’s a very tactical meeting where we’re tuning all the time. Uh, and I just, I appreciate that because we, we like to joke all the time, like my favorite two words are precision execution.

[00:18:07] Pat Primavera: Yeah. Right. You do that really well. You focus, you win. And so we’ve been able to get the partnership to a point that that’s what we’re doing.

[00:18:14] Vince Menzione: So, uh, um, I wanna hear your input too, but I just want to annotate this. Yeah. One second, because I’ve had, if I had a slide, it would be this one slide. What you did is you took the entire organization, you took the engineering teams on both sides of the company.

[00:18:30] Vince Menzione: You took the go to market, the marketing organizations would traditionally just sell, sell through. Like they, they reach audiences, they don’t think about partners. You took the, you took the co-selling piece, so how to, how to work with Microsoft, so the alliances piece, and then you took the, probably you took the customer facing piece.

[00:18:46] Vince Menzione: And then you probably put a layer, a leadership layer above that because you wanted to make sure all the executives on both sides were talking to each other, right?

[00:18:54] Pat Primavera: That’s right.

[00:18:55] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So it takes, it, it takes a village, right?

[00:18:57] Pat Primavera: It it, it does. And the timing was great because, again, if you start to think about where Microsoft is at in terms of driving momentum in marketplace, but also our sellers and how they’re compensated now, like the time was now to go do that because we’re gonna get their attention and, and so having a very intentional plan that says.

[00:19:16] Pat Primavera: Hey, in healthcare and life sciences, this is the play we’re gonna run. Here’s the 10 accounts we really care about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:23] Erika Irby: And uh, we started our relationship with Microsoft back in 2010, but we did not sign our five year agreement until 2024. Wow. And we also, earlier this year, Microsoft made an investment in Veeam to really fuel our innovation.

[00:19:37] Erika Irby: Very cool. But one of the things that Veeam, I think has made abundantly clear, and it took a while for us to, again, target and hone in on this is our commitment to Azure. Yeah. And we. Realized, you know, hey, if, if we want to have this buy-in with Microsoft, we have to buy into them. We have to have the same goals and, you know, backup for Azure VDC for Azure, all these things are incredible, but we have to make sure it ties back to what their sellers are getting paid on.

[00:20:03] Erika Irby: So that in the end, it, you know, it benefits us and, and that agreement definitely, you know, hammered that out. The weekly, you know, rumbles, wallows, it, it’s so critical to give that feedback right away. Now, I, I do wanna emphasize things are not perfect, right? Like, there’s still a lot of sausage making in the back.

[00:20:19] Erika Irby: But, you know, you brought up the point about partners. One thing is Veeam is really trying to do is integrate our alliance strategy through our partners. Because at the end of the day, if they are not included. Then to your point, it’s all of us just kinda like spitting on a fire, right? Yeah. We’re not, you know, taking that direct approach and, uh, distribution is actually a huge point for us as well.

[00:20:42] Erika Irby: They have everybody, everybody is at the distributor and leveraging that, that entity is kind of, that epicenter of the ecosystem is, I think, you know, a, a great way to have success because we’re all there and, and we can leverage their scale.

[00:20:55] Vince Menzione: And what you said is super important, and people don’t realize this too.

[00:20:58] Vince Menzione: I see this so many times in ISVs. The Alliance team sits over here and is stove piped? Yeah. From the sales team and the channel team. Sometimes they sit in a marketing function. Nothing wrong with being in a marketing function, but they’re stove pipe. They don’t talk to one another, and I see this continually.

[00:21:15] Vince Menzione: There are probably a hundred ISVs either in the room or on on screen watching us today. They probably could say that that’s still the way they’re operating,

[00:21:22] Pat Primavera: that that is one of the first questions I ask my team is when we have some of these meetings. Are the alliance folks and the cloud sales leaders in the same room.

[00:21:30] Pat Primavera: Yeah. Important. And I ask that they be in the same room because ultimately we’re gonna come out of there with outcomes. And oftentimes those outcomes lead to A CRO that we’re asking for commitment from. Mm-hmm. And so we want to make sure we’re not having to leave our working meeting and then go do internal selling again.

[00:21:47] Pat Primavera: It should be a joint plan that we’re gonna run. Yeah.

[00:21:49] Vince Menzione: And I just wanna say one other thing about the five year commitment. You touched on really being important. But it wasn’t possible to even do that because you also had to re-engineer your product to get there. Right? And so then you moved it to the cloud.

[00:22:01] Vince Menzione: And by you moving to the cloud, then you can make those commitments that got Microsoft excited in investing. Yeah,

[00:22:06] Erika Irby: a absolutely. And you know what’s so funny is when I started at Veeam, the first thing I looked for when I opened my laptop was that copilot icon. Because you know, you talked earlier about eating your dog food, by the way, you can say drink your own champagne.

[00:22:18] Erika Irby: That is, that is a, a better, um, saying for that. But. I’m glad you talked

[00:22:22] Vince Menzione: about

[00:22:22] Erika Irby: ai.

[00:22:22] Vince Menzione: Let’s, let’s go into this a little.

[00:22:24] Pat Primavera: Erica and I actually used Copilot last night. We were looking up some details around the market around, what was it, cyber? Cyber, cyber insurance. Mm-hmm. And some things around cyber insurance.

[00:22:33] Pat Primavera: And so we actually, she and I were in my computer digging on copilot, so that

[00:22:36] Vince Menzione: is cool. Let’s talk about AI though. Since you brought up ai. ’cause I think you’ve, you’ve infused it into your solutions and you’re driving against it now.

[00:22:44] Erika Irby: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, Veeam, again, cutting edge innovation. We know we, we really wanna make sure that we’re taking advantage of that.

[00:22:50] Erika Irby: But one thing, um, I do wanna call out real quickly about the team, um, integration is on our, our VP of channels has a, a alliance leader underneath him. So she’s integrated into our channels. And I have Michael Bowie here with me today. He’s our, um, Alliance Marketing manager. Michael, stand

[00:23:07] Vince Menzione: up over there so we can see you.

[00:23:09] Erika Irby: Everyone talk to Michael today. Go talk to Michael

[00:23:11] Vince Menzione: after.

[00:23:11] Erika Irby: Um, I also have, um, some other folks here with me, George Kelly and Brian Morris as well. But, uh, alliances falls under me, so under our channel marketing. So my alignment is with our VP of channels and then everyone has like a direct counterpart. So we’re all, you know, not having 14 meetings to have one meeting, you know, we’re, we’re already on the same page.

[00:23:29] Erika Irby: Um, but in terms of ai, yeah. One of the things I think also helps make our, our partnership good is that I kinda referred to this last night as our company Morals. We’re focused on security. You know, Microsoft leads in security and Veeam is absolutely one of the most secure focused companies. You know, we, we want to move into the future, but we wanna do this compliantly safely, you know, protecting that data, making sure that.

[00:23:58] Erika Irby: Things are not getting out where they’re supposed to be. At Veeam, we have our own, sorry to copilot, but we call it Veeam, uh, GPT. It’s it a chat, GPT. So the folks will use this, but it is secure only, you know, for our data. Right? Um, so, and, and we have, uh, internal teams, you know, driving our AI usage, and then we also integrate into our, our products.

[00:24:17] Erika Irby: So that insights and. Anything that, that, that customers are monitoring, using it for, it is providing, you know, all of that. And it fits so perfectly with Microsoft’s ai. Innovation and threat

[00:24:27] Vince Menzione: protection is so important to Right, because you’re really on the front, the front end of that, the ransomware attacks and everything that hit, hit everybody these days.

[00:24:35] Pat Primavera: Well, and she, she mentioned it’s really symbiotic. I mean, with us, because if you look at how we go to market, yes. Obviously we have security teams, we have teams that are gonna be focused on cloud and ai. But it’s a really niche specific conversation that you have to have with a customer. And so they are the experts.

[00:24:56] Pat Primavera: You know, we obviously can carry a broad conversation, um, and some of our sellers, I mean, our cloud and AI sellers have to carry every workload. And so the fact that they can come in and help us and partner to jointly have that sales call to carry that really specific conversation. That they really lead from is, is just fantastic.

[00:25:14] Pat Primavera: Yeah. And

[00:25:14] Vince Menzione: you are a leader in this. You have a tool, it’s the data resilience, uh, tool.

[00:25:19] Erika Irby: Yes. So take us through that. Thank you for bringing that up. I did wanna call out our, our, our Data Resilience maturity model. Yep. My CTA to you guys today is that that is an assessment tool that’s really designed for partners to leverage for their customers and it, John Jester, our CRO, he really talks about actually leveraging it for, um, opportunities beyond Veeam.

[00:25:39] Erika Irby: It is an outstanding tool, but I would encourage everyone who is a partner in this room to leverage it for the. See what kind of resilience gaps that you may have, because if you have a gap, then your customers will have a gap. Yeah. And you know, Microsoft has the customer zero approach around copilot. We all had to use it.

[00:25:57] Erika Irby: We, uh, really pushed our partners to use it. Your partners? Our partners did. It’s whatever. And with the DRMM, I really wanna encourage our partners to use that for themselves. Be that customer zero, because then you’ll create your own success story and when you go to your customer, you can demonstrate, this is how it made a difference for us, and this is how it’ll make a difference for you.

[00:26:16] Erika Irby: And I guarantee it’ll open up opportunities.

[00:26:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah, it’s fantastic. And it is, you know, ransomware, again, I come back to it because I remember all the attacks we had. Healthcare was a big market for attacks as well. So you talked about retiring Mac, uh, through this co-selling and alignment and incentives.

[00:26:32] Vince Menzione: What are the most important elements for partners to succeed in this, in this motion with you? What do you see?

[00:26:38] Pat Primavera: Yeah, I, listen, I’ll go back ’cause we’re, I know we’re short on time. Is those those pillars that I provided? Yeah. Right. Is going through the, the process of how are we doing in terms of engineering alignment.

[00:26:48] Pat Primavera: As we start to think about that build with strategy as an organization on the roadmap, I start to think about go to market and, and sales play development. You know, where are we there? And then I think there’s the co-sell activation piece. And so each of those have very discrete things that you gotta do, right.

[00:27:04] Pat Primavera: Uh, to get to a place where you’re actually ready to engage the field. Uh, yes. And data sharing and all the system stuff that we’ve talked about in the path. Yeah, that’ll happen to me. That’s just output. Yes. But all these other pillars you have to get right to be successful and get to the point where you’re sitting face to face.

[00:27:21] Pat Primavera: Rep to rep talking about how you’re gonna go engage a customer. And so, um, that’s what I’d say there. Um, my call to action that I would say for the group, uh, ’cause I love how you just did that is the opportunity is awesome for this group to actually partner together. So one of the things that is in my priorities for this year is, yes, we work with Veeam.

[00:27:41] Pat Primavera: I work with a lot of great partners, but the opportunity to actually go partner, to partner to partner. And find these solutions that work that eventually we can kind of bundle together and take to marketplace. That is the opportunity. And so I’d encourage everybody in this room to think through what are offerings or opportunities you have across the aisle from other people that are here that we can actually get together and go brainstorm on.

[00:28:04] Pat Primavera: I’m working on several right now that actually several people in this room where we’re all kind of coming together. To actually go build some of those things. And so that’s the opportunity for us. The marketplaces are there now to support those scenarios. And that’s my ask I have of this room because again, I start to think about services capability.

[00:28:21] Pat Primavera: The MSPs, we gotta accelerate migration from on-prem to cloud. There are, that’s a sweet spot for so many people in this room.

[00:28:30] Vince Menzione: Yeah, that’s really great. And Eric, I know you have a lot of insights as well on, on how to work with Microsoft, the SEM process, but we are gonna have some, we’re running outta time and we are gonna have some other sessions that’ll be very specific to that task.

[00:28:44] Vince Menzione: But I think what you called out your both of your call outs for this group, it’s just incredible. Yeah. And I want to thank you both the incredible leaders up on stage. So great to see you to be back. Thanks. Great. Great to have you Erica. So good to have you and and the Veeam team as well.

[00:28:59] Erika Irby: Yep.

[00:29:00] Vince Menzione: Thank you so

[00:29:00] Erika Irby: much.

[00:29:01] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Alright, thank you. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. We’re bringing these episodes to you to help you level up your strategy. If you haven’t yet, now’s the time to take action and think about joining our community. We created a unique place, UPX or Ultimate partner experience.

[00:29:23] Vince Menzione: It’s more than a community. It’s your competitive edge with insider insights, real-time education, and direct access to people who are driving the ecosystem forward. UPX helps you get results, and we’re just getting started as we’re taking this studio. And we’ll be hosting livestream and digital events here, including our January live stream, the Boca Winter Retreat, and more to come.

[00:29:48] Vince Menzione: So visit our website, the ultimate partner.com to learn more and join us. Now’s the time to take your partnerships to the next level.

[00:30:00] I.