Veeam 'too complex and too expensive', says new rival

Storage vendor Altaro has launched a campaign to entice channel partners to drop Veeam

New kid on the block Altaro has launched a campaign squaring up to storage and recovery vendor giant Veeam.

The campaign, called "Not Everything Begins with a V - Make Room for a Second VM Backup Provider at a Third of the Cost," was launched on 1 September.

Vice president of EMEA sales Colin Wright said that Veeam has not understood the needs of its mid-market partners, in offering products that are unnecessarily complex.

"I set up Veeam in Europe many years ago, so I know [the firm] well. Veeam has moved to the enterprise, so a lot of the partners have been left behind who play in the mid-market. Veeam at times is too complex and too expensive for a lot of its customers," Wright said.

"Arguably, if you keep adding more functionality into your product, at some stage it becomes too complex for your customer. And that customer is only using 60 per cent of the functionality but paying 100 per cent of the price."

Wright added that helping resellers scale up into being MSPs was a key priority for Malta-based Altaro.

"We launched our MSP partner programme in November, and it's already 12 per cent of our revenue… I wouldn't say we're trying to poach Veeam partners directly; it's never good to poke the monster," said Wright.

"But now is the time for us to raise our head above the parapet and say 'we're not afraid of the competition'."

Wright said he hopes that Altaro's latest campaign will build on the momentum of partners moving away from Veeam, particularly in the UK.

"Currently we have 102 MSPs in the UK. Sixty per cent of those had dabbled with Veeam originally but they said it was too expensive, too complex, didn't get any engagement from the vendor, so they reached out to us... We're finding more and more coming over daily."

Altaro claims to have 35,000 end-user customers across Europe, predominantly Microsoft focused, and around 4,000 partners.

An impending partnership with the UK's largest distributor Wescoast is also on the horizon, which Altaro says will help the firm manage its Azure cloud functionality.

However, Wright conceded that Veeam is likely to continue to remain dominant with enterprise partners.

"They have 20 [or] 30 times the revenue size that we do… Their product has tremendous value when you need that level of integration.

"But when you need a mid-market play with some very good functionality and very good pricing, I'd argue that we are a better option in that space than Veeam is."