First steps in broader European presence; finds cloud interest driven by compliance Back-up specialist Druva has formed a German subsidiary to drive partner recruitment and expansion in the DACH area. It is seen as vital to growth of its cloud-based data protection products in the region and once proven, can be rolled out into Benelux and the Nordics. The products are architected for the public cloud, leveraging Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure’s more than 30 global data regions, allowing global entities to adhere to data privacy laws. For instance, Druva ensures the data of German employees remains in Germany, managed by a German national but can still be managed in a centralised, global manner.
Druva has appointed Andreas Sturm as Regional Sales Director, DACH, to lead the company’s business development efforts. His experience includes more than 16 years in similar roles at Verne Global, Commvault and EMC. At the same time, Susan Hoch has been appointed as Channel Manager, DACH, joining the Druva team from VMware, where she spent the last eight years running partner enablement and support initiatives.
Rick Powles (above), Druva's VP for EMEA tells IT Europa that the business is set for a period of rapid growth, driven by the need for compliance among customers looking at the adoption of the GDPR data privacy rules by Europe. He confirms that much of the business is driven by a customer pull-through while channels re-organise themselves for the cloud. “There are also a number of new channels, born in the cloud who are emerging.” Just as the old-style back-up vendors are finding it hard to change to meet the new demands, so existing resellers find they need different people, new sales-models. “The old models are gone,” he says.
Andreas Sturm confirms the customer pull in Germany, saying that around one third of this business is from global customers seeking local compliance. In particular, he says, the pharmaceutical industry is a big spender on this sort of product in Germany as it looks for standards supporting HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Druva has been building its cloud business through working with both AWS and Azure, and with, it says, some 40% of corporate data now at end-points, it is finding customers responsive to the idea of protection at this level as well as the traditional server backup. Druva, which first localised its top-rated data protection solutions into German last year, has seen the rapid adoption by German, Austrian and Swiss organisations, including Andritz, Continental, DHL, Leica, Siemens and dozens of others, it says.