Veeam Software executives say the company will strengthen its messaging to the enterprise space as it looks to entrench the value of its technology in this increasingly competitive market segment.

At the annual VeeamON Forum Africa event hosted in Johannesburg yesterday, company executives confirmed the business strategy to tailor its communication to the enterprise market, to split up Africa into specific focus areas and reorganise its management structure accordingly.

Kate Mollet, recently appointed manager for Southern Africa, said the company has to strengthen its message to the enterprise market, particularly because this segment has taken some time to consider Veeam as an enterprise-grade solution.

"Part of the plan is ensuring that our sales team are empowered to take this enterprise message to these customers. Not leaving our partners or the channel behind, but we really need to take responsibility for the messaging that goes to those customers. There will probably be less of a dependency on the partner or channel community in that space."

However, the company will intensify its reliance upon storage vendors said Mollet, including Cisco, HP and Netapp, in order to reach more customers and thereby achieve more scale.

Mollet added that the company has also recruited two new enterprise account managers. "These are new roles because typically we would have territory account managers or channel and distribution account managers. Now we have actually recruited senior account managers that are very comfortable in the C-suite and comfortable talking to the top customers in our market at board level. We are actually bringing that type of talent into the organisation and where we can, we will also grow the talent that we have so that we can respond to the enterprise a little quicker."

She added, "I am responsible for the region which includes 14 countries that covers most of SADC, with its head office sitting in Johannesburg. We really leverage our partners and distribution alliances to be able to service those countries effectively. We've had really good traction in Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and we are very excited about the opportunity that Mauritius and Mozambique represent to us and we are growing that team. We have recently restructured our go-to-market messaging around Africa by breaking it into Africa-Central and Africa-South - which I'm responsible for- so that we can focus on the requirements across the continent."

Mollet's predecessor Claude Schuck will manage the newly created Africa-Central office from the company's EMEA office in Dubai.

Gregg Petersen, Regional Director explained the rationale behind management appointments.

"We had an opening in Dubai and I've worked with Claude for many years and he has done an amazing job here in South Africa and he wanted a new challenge. For me it was one phone call and it was one person that I could phone and that was Kate Mollet who I have known for a really long time. She has had a lot of success at Dell EMC and Puleng Technologies. I am very proud to have her on board and I think we will see great things."

The company used the VeeamON Forum event to launch its new Hyper-Availability Platform for intelligent data management.

Petersen said there is a great demand for the technology. "The opportunity for Veeam is intelligent data management and automation. Data is the new oil and that is where the money lies, that is where the hyper growth will come from. Africa is an important market and we have employed 25 percent more staff in the past year alone. The message is clear globally, but the opportunity in Africa is huge."