Scott Morris (Druva)
Cloud data protection and management solutions vendor Druva is ramping up its efforts across Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia through two new distribution agreements with Arrow and VST ECS.
The Californian software vendor has witnessed massive growth in the past year and secured a US$147 million investment round in April to help scale to meet market demand for its platform, which is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The latest funding round raised Druva’s valuation to more than US$2 billion.
The organisation was founded in 2008 by current CEO Jaspreet Singh, who previously indicated the Asia Pacific region as a growth hotspot.
The independent software vendor's (ISV) platform helps businesses from 50 seats upwards manage, protect and govern critical data during their digital transformation efforts, and the past few months has seen its customer base expand substantially to include Marriott, NASA, Deloitte, Sephora, Amore Pacific, Zoom, Queensland Brain Institute and Ipswich Grammar School.
Druva maintains technology partnerships with AWS, VMware and Nutanix, and recently struck a collaboration with Dell Technologies to support its PowerProtect Backup Service.
Recently appointed Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) vice president Scott Morris noted that the company will continue to drive its 100 per cent channel-centric approach through distribution.
“We’re a small company, but growing fast, and we’re set with the foundational success for the whole channel,” he said. “We’re looking for more partners, we’re under-represented from a channel point of view. We’re keen to identify partners that are keen to get onboard and work with us.”
In choosing to side with VST ECS in Southeast Asia and Arrow for Australia and New Zealand, Morris pointed out that the company looked at who was keen to invest and provide equal value.
“I approached a lot of distributors and it came down to who was interested and willing to give us a shot. Both Arrow and VST jumped at the chance and we’ve progressed very quickly,” he said.
Read more: Druva picks Exclusive Networks A/NZ as it's distribution partner
“Arrow in Australia and New Zealand have a strong value proposition and they’ve got a number of internal platforms and marketing support, and how they deal with their channel to segment and create market awareness is very strong. VST ECS has a very strong brand in North and South Asia, and through Singapore.
“Watch this space. My intention is to cascade as quickly as I can, but we’ve got to prove value and delivery in our core markets first before we go looking at spinning up new territories.”
Morris said the team was expanding, filling in key sales and channel positions, including Peter Hill as its A/NZ channels and alliances manager.
Hill previously worked at HPE and Simplivity, and has done time with Hitachi Data Systems and Cellnet.
"In the last month we've more than doubled the team that we had in Australia," he said. "We've got an Asia Pacific plan and we're expanding into more regions."
The ISV also has a Compass partner program, which was expanded into the Asia Pacific region last year, focusing on Registered, Certified and Elite tiers featuring sales and marketing resources, skills enablement and recurring margins.
