Virtualisation rates among Middle East enterprises have roughly doubled in the past four years, according to Veeam Software, as the vendor reaches 1,300 regional customers.
Speaking to Intelligent CIO’s Editorial Consultant, Eliot Beer, Veeam Software’s Regional Sales Director, Gregg Petersen said: “Back in 2011 or 2012, customers we saw were about 30% virtualised – now it’s nearly doubled. I’d say the average customer is now 50-60% virtualised. Certainly the region has caught up significantly in the last five years.”
He said the firm has seen a massive acceleration in customer acquisitions since 2011, and this year Veeam has had “double-digit growth in H1 for number of customers, revenue, channel acquisition”.
Among its newer customers are Argas in Saudi Arabia, along with a number of government ministries, banks and telcos across the region.
“We’ve done really well in all sectors. We’ve targeted all the telcos – some have bought, some are testing, some will buy. In government, we’ve done really well in all the ministries of interiors, in most central banks. In Saudi Arabia, we’ve done well with the Ministry of Interior,” said Petersen.
According to him, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, a customer since 2012, has been moving increasingly towards a virtualised environment: “NBAD uses Veeam for all their backup and replication, as well as using all our monitoring tools. They’re moving more and more business-critical applications into a virtual infrastructure – so in case of failure, they can be up and running within minutes, when previously it would take them hours to do exactly the same thing.”
