Zerto steps up A/NZ investment

Zerto A/NZ country manager, Sean Abbott.

Disaster recovery vendor Zerto is continuing to invest more resources into the A/NZ region following partner and revenue growth in the past 12 months. 

The vendor has added an extra 17 companies to the mix in A/NZ such as Secure Agility and DXC Connect, which now expands to 209. 

The growth in partners has also seen the addition of new customers in areas as finance, utilities, healthcare, law and government sectors.

Some of Zerto’s existing A/NZ customers include the likes of ME Bank, CBRE, Health Insurance Fund (HIF) of Australia and Mrs Mac’s Pies.

Zerto A/NZ country manager Sean Abbott said it experienced a huge amount of growth in the past 18 months in revenue and channel partners, resulting in growing its own local headcount from four to 15 staff.

“We’ve invested in the region considerably with regard to supporting our customers and partners,” Abbott said. 

“It’s been a huge ride for us in the past 18 months. The relevancy of us in the market, in regard to the amount of organisations that are now looking at IT resilience or business continuity strategy as part of their digital transformation plan or architecture has grown exponentially in the last couple of years.”

Abbott said partners are offered enablement training, certifications and building programs around certain sales initiatives and campaigns. 

“We’re protecting them on opportunities that they’re investing in working with us and we’re protecting them with dual reach programs - so from a sales and pre-sales perspective, we’re working a lot more closely with our channel partners with more resources in the region.”

Zerto A/NZ channel manager, Mark Spencer, added it adopts a 100 per cent channel only model, and doesn’t engage with third party distributors. 

“This allows for a more transparent, seamless and flexible process when dealing with the customer, as well as fewer complications as we’re removing one layer of complexity,” Spencer said. “We go through a process with a partner to make sure we’re a right fit, profitable, not impeding any of their other business and partnerships, and we fill a space that is relevant to them.

“Part of our strategy is to make sure that we have the resources to accommodate the demand and ongoing growth from our partners community. We’ve brought some inside sales development resources on-board that are driving leads more than ever this year, and those leads will be positioned with our partners. There will be a lot of business that will be spun up this year, and opportunities that we’re working with our partners on.”

Spencer said in the months ahead, he’ll be focused on building up partner awareness on its resiliency platform, which is relevant for many business types and sizes. 

In November, Zerto expanded the capabilities of its IT resilience platform version 7.5 to include Microsoft Azure managed disks, native scale-out, mobility between regions and managed service identities. 

“Organisations are really aware of resiliency issues in their infrastructure, applications and workloads. And that’s what we bring to the table, the ability to work across that in hybrid environments,” he said. 

Abbott said there was a constant challenge in the market around organisations relying on their backup as a disaster recovery method. 

“From our point of view, the original backup and disaster recovery strategy, isn’t working. Organisations need an instant disaster recovery architecture that we can provide on a vendor agnostic platform,” he said.