Geoff Greenlaw, senior director, head of channels, EMEA Emerging Markets, Veritas Technologies, calls out to ‘born in the cloud partners’ to come on board to jointly address regional customers’ evolving challenges around information management.
Deriving impactful and valuable insights from data is the cornerstone of every business today. However, this is easier said than done. With the heightened use of mobile devices, social media platforms and increasing adoption of advance technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI); data is growing at an exponential rate. Through software and services, enterprises are striving to analyse and gain insights on the data that they have across platforms, to be able to make mission-critical decisions.
A Wikibon research predicts that global Big Data market revenues for software and services will increase from $42 billion in 2018 to $103 billion in 2027, attaining a CAGR of 10.48%.
Perceptive to market demands and trends,Geoff Greenlaw, senior director, head of channels, EMEA Emerging Markets, Veritas Technologies, says that the firm is looking to address customers’ top data challenges through effective and unique solutions delivered by ‘born-in-the-cloud’ resellers.
According to Greenlaw, the top data challenges for customers boils down to data growth, data fragmentation, data agility, data governance and data visibility.
He says, “Data is growing at an overwhelming rate. 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. Customers are struggling to manage that volume of data growth that they are experiencing from technologies like IoT, AI and machine learning.”
Greenlaw explains that this growing data no longer sits in a single location but is fragmented across different DR sites, applications and multiple clouds. Often, customers are not aware of all the different locations where their data is stored.
“The problem is further compounded when data agility comes into the picture, which is the ability to stand up services in the event of a disaster. If customers are unable to access or recover company information or corporate websites and react within the set timelines during a crisis, it could easily result in reputational and financial risks.”
According to Greenlaw, companies are struggling to meet government and compliance regulations that they need to abide when it comes to data. This is primarily because of the earlier challenges of growing and fragmented data.
Ensuring customers have complete visibility on their data is perhaps the biggest challenge, he adds. In line with this, Veritas has also recently unveiled findings in its 2018 UAE Databerg report, which highlights that ‘dark’ data, whose value has not yet been identified, accounts for the majority of data (48%) that is stored and processed by organisations in the UAE. The report also sheds light on other interesting facts around data. (See Figure 1)
“If customers have data visibility, then they have insight to their information and can understand how fast their data is growing, how fragmented it is becoming, how compliant it is to government regulations and how agile it is during an emergency,” he explains. “Data visibility is the most important element that a company should take control of as then they can comprehend the other four elements.”
Regional partners have a huge opportunity with Veritas solutions to help customers address all their data challenges. Previously known solely as a backup firm, Veritas has been gradually evolving into a data management company over the recent years. Veritas has also been investing heavily into its Middle East partners through dedicated trainings, incentive programmes and other initiatives to enhance partner profitability.
Greenlaw says, “Partners can confidently go up to customers and offer Veritas solutions to protect and optimise data, help them with meeting governance and compliance requirements, assist in data migration, which is the capability to move data from an on-premise environment into cloud and back again in the event of a disaster.”
He emphasises that the overarching piece that sits over these four opportunity areas is data visibility.
“Providing data visibility around data protection, data migration, data governance and data optimisation is the most important aspect.”
One of Veritas’ top priorities for 2019 is to recruit and onboard more ‘born-in-the-cloud’ resellers to its ecosystem.
“Long gone are the days of selling an X86 server under perpetual software licenses. We need resellers and partners who can understand cloud infrastructure and are able to deliver and integrate related services.
“With the help of our distributors, we are looking for partners who can take our offerings around backup, archiving, replication technology, disaster recovery and so on; and combine them together to offer a unique solution to meet customer’s information management needs.”
Veritas’ ideal partners will be the ones who are focused on growing the business and are proficient technically as well as in sales.
“Above everything else, we are looking for partners who are committed to building a joint business plan together with us. Once commitments are made, we have to ensure we follow through on them and are held accountable against it,” he adds. “Partners need to be able to add incremental value by adding additional services, technology and capability.”
In 2019, the data management firm will continue to focus on its predominant markets – UAE and Saudi Arabia with equal attention on the rest of Gulf countries such as Pakistan, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar.
Confident of seeing strong double-digit growth by next year end, Greenlaw says, “Based on the findings from our 2018 UAE Databerg report, we look forward to working with our partners to drive visibility across all data points and help customers make better business decisions about their information.”
