Anita Joseph caught up with Mohamad Rizk, Regional Director, Middle East & CIS at Veeam Software to discuss GITEX 2022, multi-cloud and the company’s plans for the region.
We’ve been participating in GITEX since the first year of the event. It just keeps getting better every year and especially after the pandemic, it’s been even more so, because customers, partners and alliances are all hungry for physical meetings and face-to-face interactions. We all know that nothing beats the power of a face-to-face interaction-business are built that way, bonds are forged by looking at each other in the eye. Businesses, in particular are able to understand better their customers’ needs and pain points and thus serve them well and follow up with them in a better way. And of course, GITEX provides a bigger and better platform for us to display our future releases and share our plans with our visitors and build our business pipeline for this quarter and for the coming year.
Hybrid cloud, multi cloud-is all the rage. How does Veeam approach the whole cloud scenario?
Veeam is a software only company. We are hardware-agnostic, cloud-agnostic. Why we didn’t oblige customers or partners to go with a cloud and took the agnostic approach is because we want to give customers the freedom to choose any cloud they would want to use. Whether hyperscalers like Azure, AWS, Google or local cloud providers-we partner with everyone. We have features and standalone products to support data protection for Microsoft Azure workloads. We give customers the flexibility to migrate their workloads from on-prem to the cloud, from one cloud to another or from cloud to on-prem. Cloud and multi-cloud are big and are being seriously considered by every organisation now because it brings the best of two worlds-on prem and cloud.
What is Veeam’s plan for the region?
In the last few years, we’ve been investing in and hiring new people and we’ll continue doing that. We want to hire the best talent in the market-from a sales perspective, technical perspective and channel perspective and our team is growing.
We also have plans to invest in enabling our partners to better adopt new technologies like data protection for Kubernetes, Office 365, Cloud etc. Also, we are signing new partnerships, agreements and alliances and growing our existing relationships with Microsoft, Nutanix, RedHat, HPE and we are planning to onboard new local cloud providers so we can give customers in the region more options to migrate their workloads to the cloud.
