In the slightly more than two years that Rick Fairweather has worked at Veritas Technologies, he’s seen a lot of changes.

Fairweather joined the data management company as the Vice President of Global and Strategic Partner Organization in 2015 after spending 23 years at Cisco. In that time he’s seen Veritas separate itself from Symantec to become a privately held company -- owned by The Carlyle Group; he’s watched Veritas launch eight products in the last 12 months; and in the last six months, he’s taken on the position of Vice President of Veritas Channel for the Americas.

“So it’s been quite an exciting two years, not only for Veritas but also in my part,” Fairweather tells ChannelE2E. “The last year has also been exciting from the point of view of innovation and product development.”

In that time, the company has doubled down on its partner program, forging alliances with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and more. Fairweather says the launch of new products brings a renewed focus for the company’s sales team, but also its partnerships and partners.

“We’ve done a lot of really good work not only to elevate the productivity and the capabilities of our partners but to further align them with to those investments we’re making and the innovation we’re driving in the market,” he says.

Partner Program Milestones

According to Fairweather, Veritas has bolstered its partner programs with investments and increases in funding to drive what he calls the company’s emerging “focus products.” What he calls the foundation of the Veritas’ business consists of things like:

The company has also made steps in elevating the level of profitability for its partners that focus on certain areas of Veritas’ market segmentation, specifically mid-market, and he says the company will continue to do that.

“Fundamentally, our programs are structured to reward the partners’ investment in our capabilities and their ability to deliver our products and services into the market,” he explains. “We then provide specific incentives and rewards around targeted products, technologies, and market segments. So in some of those areas we’ve doubled and in others, we’ve tripled the incentives for our partners to motivate them to go execute in the market as they do very well for us.”

Amidst those key partnerships is the recently announced coupling with Nutanix, a hyperconverged technology provider. The deal allows joint customers to protect their virtualized workloads running on Nutanix and move applications across clouds while remaining open to any hardware, hypervisor, or cloud.

“We’re excited about the announcement and the partnership with them because we do see them as an emerging player from a platform perspective. So we look at them as an extension of our platform strategy,” Fairweather asserts. “What we’ve been able to do is give Nutanix partners and customers the ability to identify, assess, and protect workloads and data structures in a Nutanix environment.”

Intense Competition

Of course, Veritas competes in a crowded space. Key rivals include Dell EMC and emerging disrupters like Veeam toward the midmarket and enterprise and Datto in the SMB sector. Veritas went so far as to take out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal declaring “There’s a special place in Dell reserved for hardware.”

Where Fairweather says many companies are effective at carving out a niche in the market, he says Veritas separates itself by building a holistic information management architecture, focused on identity, assessment, prioritization, optimization,recovery, and more, and offering them all from a single solution.

“We’re going to continue to innovate and continue to grow that portfolio. But I think our ability to deliver a comprehensive solution really sets us apart in the market,” he asserts.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, Fairweather says the company will continue to develop and launch new products and scale its cloud capabilities.

Interestingly, he also says Veritas will continue to provide data insight and management, but will branch out from the company’s own platforms by building extensions or portals into other data sets “So that we can give customers a visibility of their data no matter where it resides.”

The company will continue to evolve its partnerships around the cloud space and evolve its partner programs “To reward behaviors we want the customers to focus on in this multi-cloud world,” Fairweather says.

“It’s been a fun year and it’s going to be a great year ahead of for Veritas.”