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Rumple
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Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Rumple »

So, I've recently been advised that veeam no longer cares about consultants who promoting their product by implementing a new partner program that basically removes the NFR keys from the silver level program and only provides them to 500k+ resellers of their product.

As a consultant, my job is to know various products and provide clients with options. I do NOT resell the products as thats a conflict of interest and a breach of trust I have with my clients.
I've been following and using Veeam since they were in diapers but apparently like a parent, I'm not longer needed to help them succeed in life.

so, i have 12 servers sitting in my home/office lab, This lab is for products that are essentially a learing platform to ensure I learn the products, can speak intelligently and implement them in a professional manner. Since I can't afford to purchase every licensed product from every vendor, I've relied on the NFR keys to accomplish this goal.

What are others doing in their Lab environments. Currently I have Veeam (or did but apparently no more), PHD, and vRanger...I've played with Trilead but its more a toy then anything....
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by tsightler » 2 people like this post

Assuming you have a VMware or Microsoft professional certification you can get a free "professional" NFR key.

http://www.veeam.com/nfr/free-nfr-license

It's only 2 sockets, but that's at least enough to play with the product in your home lab.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by chrisdearden »

So, I've recently been advised that veeam no longer cares about consultants who promoting their product by implementing a new partner program that basically removes the NFR keys from the silver level program and only provides them to 500k+ resellers of their product.
Who advised you ?
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Rumple »

Julie V Wyant, VSP, VMSP
Inside Sales Associate l Canada

Plus if you go back and look at the new Partner programs, Silver no longer gets NFR (which consultants vs resellers will alays be at)
I used to get the 6 month NFR's and I typically run 3 backup products at once (not great for storage but allows me to really run a similar configuration like replication, and backups against same VM's and do my own comparison's on how they work....
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by MIDAC »

I just had this same disturbing conversation with our new channel partner, Brenton Crowe (Channel Manager-Silver partners, Canada Central). I tried to explain to him that we are Microsoft partners, a VMware Partner, and partners with many other companies.. everyone gives us NFR's or internal licenses or whatever they call them... we run our whole business on these "free" products and as we learn them and get comfortable with them, this is what we sell to our clients. We don't recommend anything to our clients which we haven't already spent considerable time using internally.

We sell a lot of Veeam products each year, along with renewals, etc. This feels like a big slap in the face, and we too have been a supporter of Veeam since their started (we switched all our clients from vRanger to Veeam). VMware does charge us $250 a year to be a partner, but we get licenses for all their products in return, so well worth the money. I'd be happy to pay Veeam a small partner fee too if that will weed out the pretend partners/resellers, but purchasing full licenses for thousands of dollars (Veeam only offers at paltry 25% discount to partners) is not an option for us, not when other vendors will gladly give us free product to play with.

We love Veeam software but we will now be forced to look for for alternative solutions for our internal systems, and guess what, once we find a solution that we like and which works well, that is what we will resell to our clients... because we can only sell what we are comfortable with.

Think this NFR decision is very shortsighted of Veeam... :(
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Gostev »

We definitely provide NFR keys to all partners of Gold level or above. If you sell a lot of Veeam as you say, I assume you should be at least Gold level and have access to those.

However, it is important to understand that "NFR" and "internal use" licenses are different things. If you want to be using Veeam internally, you have to buy special internal use licenses. Veeam ProPartners are provided with a very hefty discount on internal use licenses starting from the Gold level.

Here is the document outlining all the Veeam partner benefits depending on the level > Veeam partner benefits and requirements (note that this is the US version, EMEA version of the program is very different).
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by MIDAC »

Gostev, the problem is that your Gold partner program is geared towards large enterprise resellers, not VARs like us. We deal mostly with the SMB market, and your Essentials product has been a good fit for most of our clients. We typically sell a client the VMware Essentials package for around $500, which gives the client the ability to run 2-3 hosts with ESXi and vCenter (up to 6 sockets). Your Essentials package will cost the client twice that of VMware, and while it used to include 6 sockets you have now reduced that to only 2... still most of our clients only have a single ESXi host, two at most, and therefore two sockets is typically enough. So for around $2,000 we can set a client up with ESXi and a solid backup solution from Veeam. We then make our money on the labour to install everything, and supporting the client environment going forward. We have 100+ clients, 50+ which we do some work for each month. As clients need to upgrade their infrastructure, we always push VMware / Hyper-V and Veeam, and typically they buy what we recommend since we are the ones supporting them.

So the problem is that as I understand it, we need to sell $500,000 worth of Veeam to qualify for your Gold partner program? That would be 400-500 2-socket Veeam Essentials packages a year!! That just doesn't happen for us as much as we would want. I realize Veeam would rather sell to large enterprise than to SMB, but in many ways your product is perfect for the SMB market and I don't quite understand why you don't want to support the resellers like us who push your products into those markets?

I just received a message from Brenton Crowe to call Bill Botti directly to discuss.. I will do that shortly to see if there is a possible solution to all this... in the meantime, I hope someone at Veeam will rethink and come up with a program geared towards those of us who market, sell, install, and support your products on a daily basis.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Just on a side note:
MIDAC wrote:and while it used to include 6 sockets you have now reduced that to only 2...
2 sockets is just a bundle, you can still purchase Veeam Essentials for environments of up to 6 sockets. Previously you had to pay for 6 sockets (no matter how many sockets you actually had), but now with 2 sockets bundle you have an ability to buy the more exact amount of sockets you need.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by averylarry »

MIDAC -- what exactly are you asking for?

a) ~$2000 of Veeam products that you can play with and learn/understand, matching what you've described is the product you sell to your clients.

b) Veeam products that cover your entire business.

c) Something else.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by MIDAC »

I'm suggesting that Veeam should model their partner program after the likes of VMware and Microsoft. By paying to be a "partner" we would achieve the following:

a) Veeam has obviously changed their NFR policies because they had a lot of companies signing up as partners in order to get free software (NFR) that they could then use internally (although this was not the intended purpose of the NFR program). By charging a yearly fee this would weed out 90% of those partners. We currently pay both VMware and Microsoft yearly fees in order to be partners of theirs.

b) Veeam would then have less but more qualified partners... as such, they should shower their partners with every product they have. This lets the partners use and fall in love with the various product offerings Veeam has and this will result in more sales. As techs use the Veeam products in-house they will feel confident recommending them to their clients.

As I mentioned previously, we are the guys in the trenches.. we eat, live, and breathe IT every day as we look after our client networks, servers, and user issues. VMware has given us copies of all their software with generous licensing to boot, and as a result we started virtualizing our own infrastructure years ago and now have half a rack full of VMware hosts that run our business. The result of us doing this internally gave us the confidence to do the same for clients, and we have been virtualizing wherever we can since. Microsoft did the same, they gave us abundant licenses for every piece of software they make, and as a result we are not a Linux shop but a Microsoft one.. we run all our systems on Microsoft software and so do our clients. As Microsoft brings out new technologies such as Lync we immediately set it up for ourselves, start using it daily, and then get our clients excited about it too.

Same goes for hardware.. we sell mostly Dell and Lenovo servers.. Dell used to give us insane discounts for servers for internal use and we bought lots.. then ended up selling Dell servers exclusively to our clients. Dell unfortunately stopped being so generous a few years ago, but Lenovo came to us instead and offered us discounts in excess of 60% off... as a result we now have several Lenovo servers in our rack plus some of our techs have some at their homes to play with... and guess what, we have been selling less Dell servers and more Lenovo servers to our clients since. I now use a Lenovo laptop daily as I visit client sites instead of a Dell one, again thanks to Lenovo looking after us as their partner.

So all I'm saying is... Veeam is a great product and we have been using it happily for years since version 3. Veeam always gave us NFR copies and we have used those to back up our numerous VMware and Hyper-V servers inhouse. Now suddenly Veeam no longer wants to give us an NFR license and now I must find another solution for our in-house backups... and I"m sure I will, there are tons of vendors now offering VM backup technology. Will they be as nice as Veeam.. probably not, but will they do the job.. probably. As we get comfortable with whatever replacement product, will we sell that to our new clients or to old ones when it is renewal time... yes, very likely. Especially if Veeam brings out version 7 or whatever and we can't run that in-house, we will have little confidence recommending a new unknown product version.

Now we are not that big of a company, but I think we accurately represent a very large number of outsourced IT providers... and I"m pretty sure they are all going to react as I have to this new policy of Veeam. That could and will mean a significant loss of business for Veeam as we all find other products to push into the SMB market... and that is what I'm trying to help Veeam see and fix before it happens.

So that's the long answer.. the short one is B. And B because if we don't have a license we can use daily, yes we will play with it for a few hours but then it will be put aside and hardly used again. We want to use what we sell so that when our clients ask us what we run our own business on, we can smile and tell them the truth.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by dellock6 » 2 people like this post

MIDAC wrote:b) Veeam would then have less but more qualified partners...
I would like to add a bit on this, because I don't feel I can completely agree with it. By paying a subscription, Veeam technically would have richier partners (depending on the annual fee), but this not automatically translate in more qualified. I'm more qualified only because I paid for a partnership status?

To me, qualified partners can arrive for a comprehensive educational program: I've seen many times Veeam partners not beeing able to deploy and even more correctly "design" a medium-size environment. Whatever falls outside of the next-next-finish procedure is out of their knowledge, and somehow you can feel it by the level of some posts coming also here into the forums by guys setting in their profile the "partner" status...

And looking at open positions at Veeam careers page, seems Veeam is already working on an education program. I hope it would offer a valuable design certification, and not some sort of exam where people can cheat with braindumps (like it's happening in VMware VCP or Microsoft...), otherwise it would again fall into the "I have a piece of paper" certification.

My 2 cents,
Luca.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by averylarry » 6 people like this post

Boy I'm sure this will sound arrogant, but you're basically more concerned with kickbacks than you are about the best things for your clients. I mean really, that is the absolute textbook definition of a kickback. Unless you want to try and classify it as a commission.

If you don't ever sell a Lenovo server to a client, are you going to continue getting a 60% discount?

If you want to be a Partner, then be a Partner. Just don't turn around and pretend to an absolutely unbiased advocate for you clients. You are a biased advocate for the companies that give you free or cheap stuff FOR YOUR INTERNAL SYSTEMS. It's not like you're just asking for enough licenses to play with in a test environment. You are clearly running your business on free or cheap stuff. Just try and convince me that you're unbiased and that it's fair you get to run your entire business (not just a testing/learning environment) on free or cheap stuff while selling those same products to your clients.

You are basing your recomendations to your clients at least partly on what it costs YOU. If Veeam is the best value, then that should be recommended to your clients, not the 2nd best thing just because YOU got the 2nd best thing free (regardless of what it might cost YOUR CLIENT).

I am a consultant. I will never ever ever accept free stuff from a vendor. INSTEAD if I wanted to represent a vendor, I would become a Partner and any clients I might have would KNOW that I am biased. It's called full disclosure.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by MIDAC »

averylarry wrote:Boy I'm sure this will sound arrogant, but you're basically more concerned with kickbacks than you are about the best things for your clients. I mean really, that is the absolute textbook definition of a kickback. Unless you want to try and classify it as a commission.
I think you missed the point where I mentioned that we only recommend products we like, have used extensively ourselves, and which we find work well. We have many vendors throwing free product at us, and when they do we try them out, but that doesn't automatically mean they will meet the above criteria. Unlike perhaps in your profession, we actually have to install and support all the software we sell, so we try to make our lives easier by sticking to the stuff we know and which works well .

Veeam is a great product and we won't stop recommending it as our #1 backup solution anytime in the near future. But as we are forced to find a new internal solution, we will eventually find something else that we like, will have used extensively ourselves, and which works as well as Veeam. Compound this with a future new version of Veeam which we then will not have used extensively ourselves, and we will likely find ourselves recommending the product we are now familiar with instead of the unknown "new" Veeam which we haven't use regularly in-house.

So no, we don't recommend products to our clients based on what vendor gave us the most free stuff.. we recommend products that we have a lot of expertise and experience with. A smart vendor will give us products to play with so that we may gain that expertise and experience in a cost effective manner.

Veeam used to provide NFR licenses to all their partners... now they are not unless you are Gold and sell $500k of product each year. A partner selling that much product is likely just doing that.. selling product. They probably sell a ton of other products as well, and they likely don't support any of it. Their sales people probably have no idea what each product does beyond what the description says on their screen. Yet someone at Veeam feels those partners need NFR licenses whereas the smaller guys like us who actually install and support the product every day don't? It is this new logic I have a problem with...
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by tsightler »

MIDAC wrote:Veeam is a great product and we won't stop recommending it as our #1 backup solution anytime in the near future. But as we are forced to find a new internal solution, we will eventually find something else that we like, will have used extensively ourselves, and which works as well as Veeam. Compound this with a future new version of Veeam which we then will not have used extensively ourselves, and we will likely find ourselves recommending the product we are now familiar with instead of the unknown "new" Veeam which we haven't use regularly in-house.

So no, we don't recommend products to our clients based on what vendor gave us the most free stuff.. we recommend products that we have a lot of expertise and experience with. A smart vendor will give us products to play with so that we may gain that expertise and experience in a cost effective manner.
In many ways I understand your point here, however, I am confused that on one hand you are talking about NFR licenses, and on the other hand about licenses for internal use in running your business. Veeam NFR licenses, like pretty much all NFR licenses, are restricted in their use to evaluation and demo purposes, and thus I believe that using them as part of a production environment would have always been a violation of the license terms. The NFR licenses are targeted for use in lab and demo environments, not production use.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by rbrambley »

As an engineer in the field supporting and enabling our partners, I wanted to add my 2 cents.

Veeam has several partners signed up as Gold that are working towards the $500k with SMB business. Obviously, these partners decided to specialize in Veeam and push all backup and monitoring software business with us. Many I've worked with tried to sell and use 2 or 3 products before they decided commit to Gold.

I've been a consultant for a VMware, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, virtualization, etc partner/reseller. We didn't have NFR keys for everything. In fact, internal use, discounted licensing is the norm. We even didn't run everything in our lab. When new products or versions came out we used trials and lab NFRs to learn. We paid for what we used internally - that was separate, production environment.

Make the commitment to Veeam. We will enable you and together we will keep you at Gold. The partner program explains it all. The perks come with the commitment.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by averylarry » 5 people like this post

. . . we run our whole business on these "free" products and as we learn them and get comfortable with them, this is what we sell to our clients. We don't recommend anything to our clients which we haven't already spent considerable time using internally. . . .
Your whole business.
I think you missed the point where I mentioned that we only recommend products we like, have used extensively ourselves, and which we find work well. . . .
No -- you missed the point where you mentioned that you only use products that you get free or cheap. That's your true first criteria, no matter how much you try to bury it.
So no, we don't recommend products to our clients based on what vendor gave us the most free stuff.. we recommend products that we have a lot of expertise and experience with.
You can't put the cart ahead of the horse.
Step 1: Find and evaluate good products.
Step 2: Choose what you consider to be best.
Step 3: Use the product until you are comfortable recommending it (or return to step 1).
Step 4: Recommend product to your clients. Continue to use it for training/learning/comfort.

But you are trying to convince us that you do this:
Step 1: Provide client the best product.
Step 2: Learn and use the best product to support the client.
Step 3: Reassure the client by letting them know that you also use the product daily and are capable of supporting and recommending it.
Step 4: Continuously evaluate the possibility of a better product.
Step 5: Evaluate another product.
Step 6: Learn and use another product.
Step 7: Decide that another product is better.
Step 8: Recommend better product to clients.
Step 9: Return to step 3.

But really you're doing this:
Step 1: Evaluate products.
Step 2: Reject any products that the vendor will not offer you free/cheap.
Step 3: Choose the best product that still remains.
Step 4: You get the idea.
once we find a solution that we like and which works well, that is what we will resell to our clients... because we can only sell what we are comfortable with.
Then buy the product that you think is best for your clients and keep up to date with it.
. . . I must find another solution for our in-house backups... and I"m sure I will, there are tons of vendors now offering VM backup technology. Will they be as nice as Veeam.. probably not, but will they do the job.. probably. As we get comfortable with whatever replacement product, will we sell that to our new clients or to old ones when it is renewal time... yes, very likely. . . .
See, you are saying that you "MUST" find another solution. Nonsense. Buy it. It's called the cost of doing business. This last quote is clearly showing that you are only going consider product that someone provides to you free or cheap. No, really -- that's exactly what you mean. You state you must use the product internally before you can be comfortable with it to recommend to you clients. You state you won't get the product internally if it's not free or cheap.

You are threatening Veeam by saying if Veeam doesn't provide you with free or cheap product, you will stop selling Veeam to your clients. Since I already sound arrogant, I'll say you are close to extortion.



For my final thought. Until you subtract YOUR INTERNAL SYSTEMS, neither you nor your arguments have any credibility with me. You do not need to run a product for your internal use to become comfortable enough to support your clients with the product. Until you subtract your internal systems, all of your arguments are nothing more than excuses attempting to justify your desire to run your entire business (YOUR ENTIRE BUSINESS, NOT A TEST/LEARNING ENVIRONMENT!) on free or cheap product -- see the first quote above.
Unlike perhaps in your profession, we actually have to install and support all the software we sell, so we try to make our lives easier by sticking to the stuff we know and which works well.
I meet with my clients and potential clients. I will reject some potential clients because I am not a good fit for them. I work with my clients to determine their priorities and their needs. I offer multiple options for a solution to their needs and help them choose an option that fits their priorities. For my main clients, I am onsite weekly. I resell, install, and support their entire network from switches and network cables to SANs, virtual servers, software applications, and backup/disaster recovery. I am more like a network administrator for hire with enough high level expertise and experience to also do the higher level quoting and support. I resell a little bit, but only as a convenience to my clients. My larger clients will have enough volume to get their own discounts from vendors. As a microbusiness, I have decided that internal test environments are not cost effective. I spend enough time onsite with my clients that I am and my clients are comfortable with my ability to maintain expertise in the products as I use them at my clients.


I decided on a final final thought. I mentioned this before, but you are absolutely welcome to run your business the way you are. Just don't pretend that you are an altruistic unbiased advocate for your clients. Don't act like Veeam somehow owes you free or cheap product. Don't threaten to switch your clients to an inferior product if you don't get free or cheap product. Don't pretend you're not getting sweetheart deals and that it influences what you do for your clients. Be a Partner and be proud of it and disclose it to your clients if you choose. Or accept the cost of doing business.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by sparky50 »

Hi,
I know most vendors provide NFR's to resellers, but in reality are often used as "Internal licenses". This benefits the vendor greatly (as well as the reseller).

If I setup a true NFR environment, and try backing up a couple of servers, I learn very little about the product. Few of us would have the bandwidth to do thorough testing. Are you going to setup functioning Exchange and SQL servers, and do complete testing in your NFR environment? However, if I use it in my Internal environment, I go through all of the pain my customers would experience. I would do version upgrades here, and work through the issues, before showing up to do the work for a customer.

So by going through this, I have confidence and experience in the product, and feel comfortable recommending it to my customers. Is it biased? Damn right it is... there are a lot of products on the market. I can't properly test more than a fraction of them. If I find a product, like Veeam, that does what it promises, I promote it.

I can't speak for everyone, but smaller resellers (say under $25m/yr) don't make enough profit margin to enable them to purchase full licensing for many of the products they actively sell. Killing off the NFR's, which a large percentage would use as an internal use, will have a huge impact on Veeam's long term sales. We never would have started selling Veeam without the NFR program. Especially when other vendors, are still willing to provide free Internal Use licensing for their full suite of products (Symantec, and others).

Yeah "dirty little secret" using NFR's for Internal use, but it is directly responsible for bringing a large percentage of Sales from resellers. It is a huge mistake to stop this program for "smaller" resellers.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by ITP-Stan »

You can all shout all you want; but the truth is clear. Small consultancy companies will sell the product they can experiment with and sometimes those experiments (like back-ups) will be run against the own production environment, and continue to run if proven successful. I understand what MIDAC is saying completely. We sell the product we are comfortable supporting.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Gostev »

Just wanted to let you all know that this topic is being monitored by Veeam's top management. Thank you all for taking time to share your opinions in a very comprehensive and elaborated manner, this really helps.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by sparky50 »

Gostev wrote:Just wanted to let you all know that this topic is being monitored by Veeam's top management. Thank you all for taking time to share your opinions in a very comprehensive manner, this really helps.
Thanks Anton,

I hope management reconsiders this policy. Our relationship with Veeam started like I am sure so many others. We were using, and selling, one of the market leader products in backup. I was dissatisfied with how it worked in VMware environments. After a bit of research, we got an NFR from Veeam, and yes, put it in our production environment (bad bad us), as it is the ONLY place we can thoroughly test a product, and live through the real life problems (yup, even Veeam isn't perfect).

This last week was a great example. We upgraded our Veeam environment, along with our vSphere environment, and ran into problems getting Veeam to work properly. We spent 6 to 8 hours resolving the problems, and spoke to Veeam tech support who knew of the problem, and offered a simpler fix that we could use for customer sites. Then yesterday I went to a sales meeting where the customer wants us to upgrade his Veeam environment. Perfect! We don't have to fumble/learn in his environment, as we went through the pain here. What would the customer have thought of Veeam, if a "simple" upgrade didn't work as expected?

We now pitch Veeam as our recommended product for Backup, and especially for Replication for DR. We don't sell tons of it, but it is the product we present as our number one recommendation. We are located in one of the larger cities in North America, and it is a very competitive landscape. Many corporate clients require multiple quotations, and so profit margins on most hardware and software are very low. I don't know if we make enough profit off of our Veeam sales to cover annual Internal licensing costs for Veeam.

Bottom line, by not offering NFR's, I believe that Veeam will greatly reduce the number of new resellers they gain, especially the really competent ones who would gain experience in their own environments using an NFR, and then be able to present themselves as a professional at the customer site. Additionally, many existing resellers will look at the profits made selling Veeam and balance it against the cost of Internal licensing, and make their decision based on the fiscal reality.

We are on your side! We like your product! It seems as an NFR is a no-cost benefit Veeam can extend to all resellers in order to keep them "on your team".
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Gostev »

Hi Garth, I believe offering NFRs is not a question. We are already offering those to Silver ProPartners and up in Europe, and will do the same in North America with the next ProPartner Program update shortly (this was already planned). The main argument on our side is regarding internal use licenses, and what to do about those. I do realize that some partners tend to "confuse" those two types of licenses, just as you have said ;)
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by sparky50 »

I will add that the NFR running in a Production environment also serves as a primary demo platform for customers, and also as a troubleshooting platform for replicating customer problems. So you could say it is a half NFR/half Internal use case. I would expect this is a typical usage. I would hope that common sense, and the economics of the situation, for both sides, will help resolve this.

Unfortunately, perhaps, there is no "norm" for the industry. Some vendors have separate NFR and Internal user licenses, as does Veeam. I would say that every vendor with a program like this turns a blind eye to NFR as Internal license. The math would be pretty easy for these vendors. Say they have 5000 resellers (of say a Hypervisor product), and 1% of those resellers have purchased Internal Use licenses, do they really think that almost none of their resellers use their Hypervisor?

Other software vendors grant us Internal Use benefits while part of their Partner program (typically with an annual Partner fee which is a reasonable amount). Now for software vendors, there is no real cost for granting the use of a license. Surprisingly, hardware vendors, who have real and easily measurable costs to supply free gear, are the most generous. If you are a good reseller of a networking product, and want a $5,000 switch for demo, often you can just receive it for free, or use vendor supplied marketing dollars to pay for it.

I am perplexed that all software vendors wouldn't not happily supply Internal Use licenses freely. In most cases resellers will sell what they are familiar with, and have experience with. I'm not going to push something from XYZ Backup Limited, which I know nothing about.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Gostev »

sparky50 wrote:Now for software vendors, there is no real cost for granting the use of a license.
That is not really true, of course. You are essentially saying that it costs us nothing to develop and market our software! When in reality, this is where most of our revenue goes :D

Even if we forget about these costs, because "the software has already been developed anyway" from your perspective, there is still on-going costs associated with providing you with the technical support. And support costs us a lot, because we do not outsource it in India or China. We have in-house teams (and the biggest support team is located in the US, think level of salaries there).

So, for us there is certainly very real cost associated with giving you and 12'000 other resellers internal use licenses for free... making it really not that easy call for us, as it may seem.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by deduplicat3d »

Opportunity Cost!!!!
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by mongie »

I don't see why you'd even offer support on an internal or NFR license...

"Sales" support - yes, but technical support? No.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by averylarry » 2 people like this post

So basically make the yearly Partner fee high enough to offset enough of the ongoing tech support cost to make it palatable for Veeam.

Oh -- and of course increase the license costs so paying customers cover the difference.

And I'm not being snarky -- that's exactly what other vendors do. It's the likely reality of being a software vendor. Not that it makes me as an end user happy.

Of course -- I also hate the practice of tipping the wait staff in a restaurant. Just charge me what it costs and pay the wait staff appropriately. But I digress.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Gostev »

mongie wrote:I don't see why you'd even offer support on an internal or NFR license...
Because it is unthinkable to distribute disaster recovery product for use on production systems without technical support. Especially to our partners, who must have great success implementing our product before they will recommend it to their customers.

Without support, many will get stuck on some basic environmental issues, and will stop using and recommending our product thinking it is unreliable and unstable. That's the opposite of what we are trying to achieve here (seeing the earlier arguments on why internal use licenses should be free for partners).
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by sparky50 »

Gostev wrote:That is not really true, of course. You are essentially saying that it costs us nothing to develop and market our software! When in reality, this is where most of our revenue goes :D

Even if we forget about these costs, because "the software has already been developed anyway" from your perspective, there is still on-going costs associated with providing you with the technical support. And support costs us a lot, because we do not outsource it in India or China. We have in-house teams (and the biggest support team is located in the US, think level of salaries there).

So, for us there is certainly very real cost associated with giving you and 12'000 other resellers internal use licenses for free... making it really not that easy call for us, as it may seem.
Oh, I absolutely agree and understand. My point is that say ABC Networks spends a lot of money on their software for their switch, as well as the hardware, but it is relatively easy to get an NFR switch from them. They have both the software dev cost, as well as the hardware dev and production costs. That aside, my point about the software costs is that you have the dev costs whether you give out NFR/Internal Licenses, or not.

Your point on support costs is valid, and 90% of the vendors we deal with provide us with free support. We rarely use it, except when the product doesn't work as advertised.

My viewpoint is that this is a cost of sales, of having those 12,000 resellers on the street, approaching customers about your product. We assume that cost, plus in our case, a considerable investment in learning your product, best practices, and how to troubleshoot it. The time my tech spent doing the upgrade this last week, and troubleshooting it, represented $1200 in time that was not billable. I don't care, it is how things work, but it illustrates that resellers have real costs to sell and support Veeam as well.

Veeam could go the other way... skip the resellers, hire 100 more inside and outside sales staff, oh, and maybe another 50 support staff to handle support calls that resellers normally handle for the product.

Don't get me wrong. I like working with Veeam, and I like the product. Veeam management has to realize there are very real costs for both sides. There are likely lots of freeloaders, but there are undoubtedly lots of resellers like us, who put a lot of time and energy into representing your products in the most professional manner.

BTW, I have had good experiences with your tech support, and this forum, with your active participation is great.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by the-waves »

NO NFR = terrible idea for partners.
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Re: Home Lab licensing for consultants

Post by Yuki » 3 people like this post

I love free, who doesn't? Do i want an enterprise version of Veeam for free to cover all of our internal systems? You bet i do. But i don't believe that Veeam owes us those licenses just because we may recommend them to a client (we are an MSP). In fact, I see this as a gesture of good will towards community if they do so, but in no way should this be expected. If they provide you license (not a trial, but NFR) that you use for production internal systems for more than 30 days, guess what - this probably just cost Veeam a sale and is against your agreement with Veeam. So why should they even grand you the status of the partner if you are already breaking the trust? If that's the way consultants/resellers structure business, then i think they are making a disservice to clients by recommending products based on what they get from the vendor.
By using NFR for production use you are putting yourself into the same category as people who download cracked versions or use stolen licenses. The argument of free long-term licenses required to learn software in depth is dishonest. If you want to learn the best tool in the industry for backing up VMs, then you can surely spend $800 on a commercial license and use that (essentials, 2 socket, tier-A) and use it in production. If your business can't afford this much, then you are not a real business.

We are managed service provider - we do not resell ANYTHING (software or hardware). All recommendations we make are done strictly on "best fit, best product" basis. If our clients need file level backup, we will recommend something else, but if they need VM level - it's Veeam. We are working with companies ranging from small offices to $billion (that's with a B) valued corporations and recommendations are made on the merits, not on what we can get for free from vendor.


Anton, Veeam and all - you guys worked hard to make a great product, you are providing good support and you are probably paying decent wages to people on several continents. Free licenses for resellers and consultants are appreciated, but NOT required.
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