Belinda Jurisic (Veeam)
Veeam has combined two teams in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, expanding the remit of APJ senior channels director Belinda Jurisic to take charge of its cloud service provider (VCSP) team, in addition to her current duties within the channel portfolio.
VCSP previously ran as a separate business unit, and was combined into one unit in APJ following the departure of former APJ cloud and services providers vice president Asanga Wanigatunga, who left the vendor in January after three years and has now moved into a new Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) regional vice president role with security vendor Snyk.
As part of her expanded remit, Jurisic will be responsible for driving cloud adoption and growth among Veeam’s APJ service providers, customers and building go-to-market (GTM) strategies. In APJ, Veeam’s ecosystem is made up of more than 2500 active resellers, cloud and service providers.
Jurisic will also continue driving strategy and global alignment into different functions and regions, supported by key hires including the appointment of Behzaad Habibi as APJ marketing director for channel, alliances and VCSP.
Habibi will be instrumental in building strategic partnerships and developing the partner ecosystem across the region to drive further growth.
“We now have one ecosystem that looks at our VARs, distributors, aggregators, service providers, value-added services partners as well as the expanding public cloud piece -- where we have an offering with AWS, Azure and now Google Cloud," Jurisic said.
"We’re looking at who are those partners that we’re transacting directly through someone like AWS and how do we work with them? Our licensing strategy very is portable across on-premises and in the cloud.”
Jurisic said her team has continued to expand and is now made up of 70 individuals that will be driving more partner-to-partner discussions, identifying opportunities for cross collaboration, along with tapping into the public cloud conversation.
“We didn’t reduce our staff, we increased the number of people in APJ, and also by being very visible, we were able to answer customers,” she said. “It’s not just a case of selling to a customer as a transaction, it’s very much understanding how the customer is going to future proof themselves.”
Recently, Veeam CEO and chairman William Largent revealed that even with the unforeseen challenges and circumstances that 2020 started out with, Veeam continued to grow with bookings amounting to more than US$1 billion and 22 per cent year-on-year increase in annual recurring revenue.
During 2020, Veeam clocked up more than 400,000 customers, with its Backup for Microsoft Office 365, becoming the fastest growing product for the vendor, securing 73 per cent year-on-year growth. This rounded a year of key acquisitions in Insight Partners and Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery vendor, Kasten in the fourth quarter.
“We had some successful large deals and one was with an Australian government department where we backed up and migrated 16,000 Office 365 users to Azure over one weekend,” Jurisic said. “No matter what the product is, Veeam is very simple. The complexity is only in the customer environment, so we can work with any of our partners to ensure we deliver the best customer experience in those migrations.”
According to Veeam APJ senior vice president Shiva Pillay, who, until earlier this month was APJ vice president of sales and field operations, the region is growing at around 10 times the market average, something that couldn’t be accomplished without its partners and customers. During the fourth quarter of 2020 APJ saw annual recurring revenue increase 24 per cent year-on-year.
“We would not have been able to garner these results without the constant support and hard work with our partners -- over 1700 transacting partners in Q4,” Pillay said. “We continue to focus and invest in our relationships with existing and potential partners, which has been well received and backed with strong results."
Pillay added that, in the fourth quarter, Veeam saw about 200 partners take the investment leap into gaining the highest level of accreditation, which gives them the ability to design, build and deploy Veeam solutions which in turn supports this customer growth.
“Veeam's priorities remain clear and focused on helping our customers and partners build the best data protection platform for virtual and modern data infrastructures, and at the same time, protect workloads on-premises and across multi-cloud environments,” Pillay said.
“We continue to execute well and plan to continue our growth momentum in APJ, backing that up with hiring across all functions to support our customers and partners.”
