Highlighting the growing interest of Saudi Arabian enterprises in data center availability technologies, Veeam® Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center™, has reported a 40% growth in its number of new customers in the first half of 2015. With an impressive tripling of Veeam's year-on-year total revenue bookings in the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia is fast becoming one of the company's largest markets in the Middle East.
In line with its growth strategy in Saudi, the company appointed Rawad Zaki as Territory Manager, Saudi Arabia early this year. “Rawad is an experienced IT professional with eleven years in the industry including the last four years in Saudi working closely with customers and partners. His technical proficiency, impressive track record in sales and intimate knowledge of the local market make him an ideal candidate to lead Veeam’s efforts in Saudi. We are confident that under his leadership our company will be able to rapidly increase its footprint and market share in the country,” says Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC, Veeam Software.
While the results in the first half of 2015 have been strong, Veeam continues investing, expanding its partner network to achieve the ambitious growth targets set for the Saudi Arabia. One of the biggest channel initiatives was the launch of the VMCE certification training program that has enabled channel to fulfill end-to-end transactions with minimal support from the Veeam team. Veeam Availability Suite v9, coming out later this year, will offer service providers a direct pipeline to benefit from the Veeam ecosystem through the opportunity to provide customers with Veeam Cloud Connect replication and cloud-based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS).
Mr. Ahmed Al-Masdar, Business Manager at FutureTec Solutions, a company based in Riyadh that is part of Veeam’s ProPartner Network says, “Based on research study, the cloud computing market worldwide is expected to grow to $19 billion by 2016, and Saudi Arabia is no exception where the major companies and government organizations are moving toward private and public cloud through virtualization and Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC). With this change in the market, ensuring 24/7 uptime and availability is absolutely critical. FutureTech Solutions as a virtualization expert company has progressed in the market of availability solutions that leverage modern datacenter technologies, such as virtualization, storage and the cloud. We provide our customers with a data availability solution that is reliable, affordable and easy to use for their virtual environment, private and public cloud. Veeam has become an integral and strategic solution in our portfolio.”
“The partnership with Veeam has been extremely successful as we see a growing uptake of the company’s solutions among customers in Saudi. The Veeam ProPartner program combined with the highly responsive and supportive channel team have been huge factors in our success in the market. We anticipate that in the near future we will make an even more significant contribution and are working towards being recognized as Veeam’s best performing partner in the region.”
Veeam has made significant strides in the region this year with major customer wins as well. Since customers in Saudi feel more comfortable doing business with vendors with whom they have a direct relationship, the company has organized various end-user focused interactive networking forums that educate customers about the latest technology trends and product innovations from the company. All this has resulted in Veeam making inroads into the enterprise and government sectors and winning high profile projects.