As Veeam scales up to a billion-dollar company, a good chunk of the revenue will come from the Asia and Japan region.
Revenue from this region grew 38 per cent last year, faster than the global rate of 33 per cent, said Effendy Ibrahim, Veeam’s vice-president for Asia and Japan.
“The good news is that the regional growth is not fueled by renewal contracts but by the addition of new customers. The Asian market potential is good because the use of cloud services and adoption of virtualisation is continuing to grow quickly for at least five years before market saturation,” he said in an interview.
Currently, Veeam has about 6,000 customers including governments, he added. “We’re also eating into the space occupied by the legacy backup vendors. We’ve a more comprehensive suite of products than they have.”
For the Chinese and Japanese markets, he pointed out that it was nascent days yet. “We’ve opened offices there, started marketing activities and building up the channel ecosystem. It will take us a few more quarters before we see revenue growth.”
“We see some big opportunities in China in industries like energy, healthcare, manufacturing and government. We would specifically be working with local vendors. We will add Huawei to our channel partner list. In Japan, we will be working with Hitachi Data Systems.”
Veeam has begun to hire more people in the region. In 2015, there were 40 people, and by last year there were about 100 of which 30 were based in China.
An Asian office based in Singapore opened six years ago but it was more opportunistic than deliberate, pointed out Effendy. Veeam wanted to create awareness and support its American and European customers.
The expansion in Asia today is more planned as the company aims to be a multi-billion dollar company by the next decade. Veeam will work with its 3,000 channel partners in Asia and Japan to grow its business.
Grace Chng is a veteran tech writer
