Veeam Sees Great Opportunity For Growth In India: Shaun Mclagan, Senior Vice President – APJ, Veeam Software

Very focused on the SMB and virtualized space, Veeam Software started a decade ago. The company formed the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) business in 2017 and then added the India and SAARC business into APJ as they used to sit as a part of European business. This allowed them to focus on the hyper-growth opportunity that they have in India. Veeam’s European business grows at about 20 per cent, American business at about 35 per cent, and APJ business at about 60 per cent. 

In a conversation with Sarabjeet Kaur from BWCIOWORLD, Shaun McLagan, Senior Vice President – Asia Pacific and Japan of Veeam Software, speaks about how the biggest growth engines for Veeam Software inside the Asia Pacific and Japan region is the India business. Veeam sees great opportunity here as they are hiring and investing in this marketplace with people, processes and technology. Excerpts: 

BWCIOWORLD: Please give an overview of the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform?

Shaun: When we think about the challenges that need to be solved for organizations, we see a world where their creation and requirements around the availability of data and storage are larger than it has ever been. The surface which we need to protect is very large; the concept of controlling data is evaporated into a world where we have got data inside our data centers, inside the cloud— be it hybrid cloud, public cloud or hyper-scaler and data being created at the edge.

With this, we took our technology around our back up recovering replication technology and built a platform which allows us to service workloads in public, private and managed cloud, SaaS applications like Office 365, OneDrive and SharePoint but also allow us to take care of physical as well as virtual or cloud workloads. We also underpin that platform with an API Interface that allows us as an independent software company to work with some of the biggest brands and leaders in the industry, to integrate with their technology, allowing our customers the freedom of choice, as to their partners inside of their infrastructure stack but integrating with us as the availability platform for them.

Allowing organizations to deal with the reality of the huge sprawl of data, we see a multi-cloud world and a movement of data between clouds and Veeam’s unique proposition is to give that single pane of glass to organizations to allow availability no matter where that data sits today or where it’s moving to.

BWCIOWORLD: Enterprise data is mostly scattered across different cloud systems. How would you recommend organizations to keep it secure as well as handy?

Shaun: While that is exactly where the challenge is, I think, a lot of organizations in India, Australia, and New Zealand are huge cloud adopters. It’s almost like the outsourcing, kind of the late nineties where we’re just moving workloads and a bit of your mess for less strategy. Data protection and availability wasn’t assumed when organizations figured this out in this concept. Now the opportunity is how we leverage cloud workloads to deliver a service for us but the ownership and the responsibility around availability still sit with the company. 

I think, yes, the role of our IT leaders today and business leaders are, how we deliver an acceptable level of protection and availability to the new data workloads which sit across the multiple spans of cloud on-premise and SaaS. So the conversations that we have with the organizations are not about repatriation of data and getting our arms around it. It’s about how can we protect the data which is the life, blood, and oil of our organization when we know it’s going to be spreading across multiple facets. Now we’re seeing the higher velocity of data movement even between clouds but we thought this workload was a really good fit for certain cloud provider. We actually might move that to another one or hosted provider or we’re seeing also repatriation or bringing back of certain workloads to our on-premise or hybrid clouds. So I think your statement is exactly correct until the correct state of play is organizations looking to reduce risk but increase agility to their organization dealing in this multi-cloud world.

BWCIOWORLD: What are some examples of solutions that Veeam provides to achieve this kind of intelligent data management?

Shaun: Down the years, we found that our customers don’t see the physical environments growing at a rapid rate but they do see that they’re still housing critical data. So we added the availability to protect Windows, Linux and now UNIX based physical workload. We then contemplated a world where the key data assets were moving to the cloud, be it SaaS, in Office 365 or the SharePoint example or others. So our view is that we can protect any app, any data at any cloud allowing an abstraction layer of where that data resides but providing a single pane of glass for those three or four different destinations of workload. This is a unique proposition from Veeam as we’re not selling down a hardware infrastructure layer. We’re saying, we see data everywhere. 

BWCIOWORLD: What are your strategies for India business?

Shaun: We at Veeam know that we have got to invest to win. We haven’t been in this marketplace for more than 10 years as we have in others so we have invested in leadership, business leaders, solution architects, alliance people, and pre-sales teams. We have just put together an inside sales organization based in India out of Mumbai to give us the reach in scale across the country. So we are investing people wise and technology wise we are meeting with some of the local cloud service providing partners to help us understand how to work extremely well with them.