174 – John Jester: This Tech Executive is Reshaping Veeam’s Future with a Customer and Partner-Fi...

Vince, it's fantastic to be here with you on The Ultimate Guide to Partnering podcast.

Yeah, it's great to be here. I think we shared eight years together at Microsoft, so quite some time together working with partners, helping them be successful back at Microsoft. A rich career in technology – of course Microsoft and the work that I've done at Google. But for our listeners that don't know you, can you tell us a little bit more about John Jester? I spent almost 20 years at Microsoft in various roles, including the global accounts business – the top 100 enterprise accounts around the world – the worldwide specialist sales team that focused on cloud, and building out Microsoft's customer success business which owned global adoption of Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and consumption for Azure. Then a little over three years at Google Cloud running worldwide professional services, customer success, support, learning, and the executive engagement program. It was all about how to work closely with partners to add value to customers and make them successful using Google Cloud, using Microsoft. So a long history working with partners and in the enterprise space.

Yeah, and I think all of us have that challenge. We work in a cloud world – how does a vendor like Microsoft, Google, or Veeam work closely with a partner ecosystem to add value to customers? That's one of the things that's been great about the shift to cloud – it's about adding value. Microsoft investing in creating a customer success unit is a great example of moving from selling software to working with you to add value. At Microsoft that really went a long way in helping customers be successful. Same thing at Google – Google made a big investment to build out customer success to help customers get more value from the platform.

Yeah, I've been at Veeam as CRO for nine months now. We are a leader in the marketplace. We're very proud – we're number two worldwide market share according to IDC, and probably even more importantly, we have 450,000 customers. I talk to those customers, I talk to our partners, and we know that data is one of their most important assets. We aspire to help them manage that data, protect that data anywhere they have it – on premises, in the cloud, through a cloud solution provider. We want to provide that solution to help customers manage data wherever it is and protect that data. That's our mission, that's what we're focused on.

Yeah, the main thing we want to do is help customers manage and protect their data wherever it is. That's the goal, that's our focus, and we're going to do that by working closely with our partners. One of the things we're so proud of at Veeam is we are a 100% indirect business – every deal goes through partners. It's core to how we think about our strategy and how we go to market. Even with that focus on working closely with partners, the main thing we anchor ourselves in is how do we make our customers successful. I think that's how you create the best partner models – you don't just sit down and talk between the vendor and the partners about what we're going to do together, you start with the customer and the innovation we're bringing, the business problems we're trying to solve, and then reverse out the right partner model so you can go to market together and make those customers successful. At Veeam, our product portfolio is getting broader – we've added protection for Microsoft 365, we just launched a new product for Salesforce, and we've seen tremendous growth for a product we call Kasten, which protects Kubernetes. That means we have a more complex product portfolio and we have to work with our partners in new ways. We've launched a competency program so partners can have the right competencies across that portfolio. Partners also came to us and said they're starting to specialize and asked how we can help them work together in the partner ecosystem, so we've focused on bringing our partners together to create better solutions for our customers. That's what we're trying to get done – anchor ourselves on making the customer successful and work with our partners to make that happen.

Absolutely. It makes me incredibly proud when I hear that about partners really wanting to work with Veeam because it is part of our DNA. We do our partner advisory councils every quarter – the feedback I get from partners is like gold. We have 35,000 partners that work with us. We want to engage with each partner – through our competency program that we've been investing in. Work with us, help us understand where you want to focus, what your competencies are, and how we can help you develop those and go to market together. One thing I'd call out is our Veeam Cloud Solution Provider (VCSP) program. Customers asked for a cloud solution provider type service they can consume like cloud but customized to their needs. We now have over 10,000 VCSP partners who are hosting Veeam, working with customers, creating unique solutions. That's an example of thinking about a customer need, reverse engineering the right partner model, developing competencies, and taking it to market together. Some customers want to work with hyperscalers, so we're in the marketplace for Azure, AWS, GCP. Our distribution partners have their own marketplaces – TD Synnex, ArrowSphere, Ingram Marketplace – and they asked us to be part of that. We really try to listen to our customers and work with our partners to build the solutions they want and create mechanisms they can purchase and consume based on their choice.

Yeah, we have a dedicated onboarding program where we go through the technical competencies. A lot of those VCSPs customize our product and add value-added services. We spend time with them – we don't just want partner number 10,001 offering Veeam as-is. We want to understand their unique competencies, how they can extend our product, add additional services, and add more value for their customers. That's the type of conversation we lean into. I think we're somewhat unique in that we put part of our partner organization actually in our engineering team, because that's how we do the most innovative things – understanding what the partner is trying to achieve and working with engineering on how to create the APIs partners need to customize the solution. On the VCSP front, come work with us, talk to us about your customer base and competencies, and let's create something unique in the market. Even the GSIs have approached us about building out business continuity and data protection practices – it's the same approach: engineering work, understanding customer needs, and creating a differentiated solution that makes the partner unique and makes Veeam more relevant to our customers in that space. These are areas I get excited about – how to really think about the customer, reverse engineer the solution, and then do the engineering or commercial work to bring it together.

There are three things that jump out when I think about the best partnerships. First is what we've already hit on – start with the customer, reverse engineer the solution you need to bring to market. Second, partner models have to have success and profitability for both the partner and the vendor. Getting that right – it sounds simplistic, but the long-term partnerships I have are ones where we do quarterly business reviews, those metrics and KPIs show the vendor is successful, the partner is successful, and ultimately the customer is successful. I've got to brag on Veeam – our Net Promoter Score is 82. That's about having a product customers love and having partners that implement that product and make it work. We would not have achieved that NPS of 82 without our great partner ecosystem. So three things: start with the customer, reverse engineer the solution, and build the right model from the start for mutual success with great communication in QBRs and reviews.

Yeah, that's so important. If you build that type of model, you're going to create long-term success, and that's what we're oriented on.

The first thing I always run into when something goes wrong in a partnership is poor communication. It sounds so simple, but how many times is someone unhappy with the dynamics of the partnership or a big customer implementation going wrong, and instead of communicating – saying I need help or this is not working for me – they stay quiet? Be transparent, have the conversation. When you have an open dialogue, you can course correct, fix partnerships, fix challenging customer implementations. Without open communication, things build up and inevitably there's a blow-up that can be unrecoverable. Open communication is number one. We're only successful if we make our end customer successful, and that comes by working, adapting, and recognizing that we're not going to have everything right from day one. We have to adapt and change, and if we communicate and talk to each other, we can make that happen.

You're spot on. I spent three and a half years in the UK while at Microsoft, and there was a term they called 'tea and biscuits' – sit down with a partner, have tea and biscuits, be very nice, but don't talk about anything difficult. It's important to stay away from that type of relationship because it may feel good but you're not creating a great partnership or building better solutions for customers. Avoid the tea and biscuits meeting – I do enjoy tea and biscuits, don't get me wrong – but talk about the tough issues, go after that elephant in the room. That's how you'll have a better partnership.

So important.

Early in my career, someone pulled me aside and gave me really good advice: it's not what you accomplish, it's how you accomplish it. I know that sounds simplistic, but a good test for all of us, especially early in career when leading teams, is that you'll work on a tough project together. If it's a successful project, that's not actually what determines the long-term sustainability of your ability to get things done. It's the people on that team – would they volunteer to work for you again? How you treat people, how you make them successful, is much more important to long-term sustainability than just getting a project done. Early in our career we think high-five, job well done, but it's really about whether people want to continue to work with you.

The big thing – and I sound like a broken record – is start with the customer, reverse engineer what you need to get done, enable your teams, put the KPIs in place, open communication. Doing all those things sets us up for success.

I would invite Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Isaac Newton. I think all of them were innovative and thought leaders in their respective time frames. They were all probably thought of as slightly crazy by the mainstream for coming up with creative and innovative ideas. But the level of personal conviction and the ability to think through incredibly difficult challenges – Einstein's theories are still being upheld as we do additional research. It would be fascinating to get a sense over dinner of their thought process, how they went about thinking through completely new undiscovered areas and coming up with inventions. I'm a bit of a geek, so you can see who comes to dinner.

I could see this happening in Napa Valley, California. With the right wine setup, a little sunset action, we could get the most creativity out of the conversation and really get people to open up and chat.

It's early February; most of us have just wrapped up our sales kickoffs. I say take that energy, take that excitement, go meet with your partners, go meet with your customers, craft the solutions our customers need. It's a better environment right now from a business perspective – that's the signals I'm getting from customers and partners. Take that energy and excitement and use it to get off to a fantastic Q1.

Thanks for having me, Vince. Really enjoyed it.