Two years ago in Las Vegas, then-CEO Ratmir Timashev speaking at he keynote for VeeamOn, spoke about moving to the Cloud as a key strategic priority for Veeam and their partners.
This year, Veeam’s Cloud focus has only continued to grow as they help customers move to and manage data in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments; with announcements and new solutions all aimed at helping partners and channels solve the problem for customers.
Growing in Asia
During the Day One keynote for VeeamOn 2017, Peter McKay, the company’s co-CEO and President, noted that Veeam has had an 87 per cent customer renewal rate, and enjoyed 28% growth year-over-year.
This growth came despite that fact that many of their key competitors had been recently losing share, including Commvault, down 4.1% in market share growth year-over-year, Veritas was down by 3.6%, and Dell EMC, down 5.7%.
Effendy Ibrahim, Vice President of Asia and Japan for Veeam, said that while Europe remained the core of the company, North America and Asia are fast becoming key focus areas. Ibrahim added that in 2016, Asia’s revenue grew by 38% which was faster than the 33% growth for global revenue. “What was good is that the growth was fuelled not by renewals, but by adding new customers,” Ibrahim said, as Veeam was considered a realtive newcomer to the region.
According to Ibrahim, while the adoption of Cloud and virtulization was growing in Asia, there was still a long way to go before we reached a saturation point so he foresaw another three to five years of continued growth before needing to take marketshare from incumbents.
This came despite what some may call slow investment in the region for Veeam.
But Ibrahim disagreed saying that it was more important for Veeam to get the messaging for partners, channels and customers right. “We are not just backup company but also an Always-on Availability one,” he said. It was also important to build the right channel and partner ecosystem, to go to market effectively, he added.
According to Ibrahim, Veeam had still made substantial investments in the region in terms of manpower. “At end of 2015, we had 40 ppl across Asia and more than 100 at the end of 2016,” he said, “And we expect this number to continue to grow in 2017.”
McKay agreed with Ibrahim adding during a meeting on the sidelines on VeeamOn 2017 that he foresaw a couple of years stil to go before saturation and in the meantime, Veeam was working on broadening it’s addressable market with its push into the enterprise space. “Our focus right now is working to gain market share,” McKay said, “After we grab the market share and we can upsell solutions and that will drive growth.”
Ibrahim said that Veeam currently had 3,000 partners across Asia of which 10% were cloud partners and importantly, the company had 6,000 customers in the region and was in line to grow this number in the coming year.