Covid-19 bites as Zerto terminates all Asia Pacific employees

Zerto has terminated all employees in Asia Pacific in response to declining market investments due to Covid-19, with the disaster recovery vendor also making a similar round of cuts in Europe.

That’s according to Data & Storage ASEAN (DSA) - a specialist news website co-founded by Andrew Martin, former regional vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan at Zerto.

The publishing house has claimed that the entire team in Asia Pacific have been released from employment, with staff informed following a series of conference calls on the morning of Tuesday 31 March.

While exact numbers remain scarce at this stage, Channel Asia understands that the round of redundancies impact staff in Singapore, Australia and Japan, which is further corroborated via a LinkedIn search.

Considered an expert within the field of data storage specifically, DSA were quick to question the move, branding the decision as a “head-scratcher”.

“Especially since they had great technology and built great mindshare, partners and customers across the Asian region,” the website stated. “To make such significant job cuts so quickly into this pandemic makes us suspect that Zerto might be masking more fundamental issues.

“We can’t be sure, but we suspect that Zerto may have deeper issues, potentially struggling to maintain the technology gap they have held in the software-defined disaster recovery space.”

The move comes weeks after the vendor announced plans to increase resources investment in the region, with a specific focus on Australia and New Zealand following partner and revenue growth during the past 12 months.

As revealed by sister publication ARN, Zerto recently added an extra 17 providers to the mix at a local level, including Secure Agility and DXC Connect, expanding the vendor’s partner count to 209.

The growth in partners also resulted in the addition of new customers in areas as finance, utilities, healthcare, law and government sectors, with existing customers including ME Bank, CBRE, Health Insurance Fund of Australia and Mrs Mac’s Pies.

In response to DSA’s exclusive report, Zerto cited "financial viability" as the reason behind the redundancies.

“The winning companies will be the ones who successfully transition and put themselves on a path to profitability,” a statement read. “Zerto has today committed to streamline its core business and reduce operating expenses.

“We made this move to ensure that Zerto will weather this storm and will continue to be successful. It was an extremely difficult decision, but we are taking these steps to ensure that Zerto remains financially strong now and in the future.”

At this stage, there has been no indication from Zerto regarding how partners and customers in Asia Pacific will be managed going forward.