Veeam Software announced a new initiative to give away up to $200 million through an exclusive Veeam FREE Cloud Services program. Effective immediately, every customer using Veeam for on-premises backup and recovery is now eligible for up to $1,000 in free cloud backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) from Veeam and its partners.
This commitment to invest in DRaaS adoption comes as demand of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program from enterprises of all sizes soars in 2017 on top of 79 percent YoY in Cloud during 2016. DRaaS continues to gain momentum due to more affordable prices and enhanced functionality to meet availability and compliance requirements. Gartner estimates the DRaaS market will nearly triple within the next three years, to a revenue point of $3.4 billion by 2019.
“Organizations across the globe are increasingly adopting cloud platforms for IT and business solutions, and they need an Availability platform that is scalable, reliable, secure and adaptable enough to leverage multi-cloud infrastructures,“ said Paul Mattes, Vice President of Veeam’s Global Cloud Group. “We, along with our partners, recognize this opportunity and are fully committing to major investments supporting our partners and end-users, and further delivering on our cloud vision and strategy.“
In addition to helping customers embrace the benfits of DRaaS, the Veeam FREE Cloud Services program is designed to help traditional resellers expand in the midst of a cloud-based services market shift. Veeam is connecting resellers with VCSP partners, helping them establish cloud services businesses that generate growing monthly recurring revenue streams.
This limited time offer is available for all Availability Suite, Backup & Replication and Backup Essentials end-user customers with active Veeam maintenance contracts. FREE Cloud Services program will initially launch in North America, with plans to expand into EMEA, LATAM and ANZ regions in the next few months.
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