Country Manager
(India & SAARC)
Zerto is leaving no stone unturned to boost its presence in India particularly in the BFSI sector. Its Country Manager (India & SAARC) Sumit Garg and Zerto APJ Director, Andrew Martin shares some key strategies and plans in an interview with Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN) to take the company to newer heights. Excerpts:
What kind of services and technologies does Zerto offer to its customers?
We are a software company with our core area of strength isnbusiness continuity and disaster recovery for virtualised, software defined and cloud based environments. We offer some really unique value propositions in this area with two routes to market. The first allows our customers to purchase our software and own it on premise, the second is to work with one of over 250 service providers globally that offer disaster recovery as a service powered by Zerto. Our reach is global and we are beginning to develop our business further throughout Asia. We began our investment in this region less than two years ago yet we are already working with major well-known customers and partners in every part of Asia and into almost into every sector including finance.
In terms of Indian BFSI market how relevant is your software? How would you describe your current positing in India?
Zerto is highly relevant to BFSI. This sector is tightly regulated in terms of application protection and recovery, with many companies struggling to meet the regulations. Recovery audit is often problematic and time consuming. Zerto is unique in addressing these concerns in the BFSI sector. We have been working with various organisations and partners who address this market. We find that our solution can not only help to protect critical applications and data but also help with mobility. In every country across Asia including India, we are already working with many customers from the BFSI sector.
Our company is just over five years old and in Asia we are very much in startup mode. Unusually for a company in such early stages, we are finding that many large institutions in India are already using our software, actively trailing our solutions. We have a BFSI footprint in almost every country in Asia.
What is the main focus of your company? For the BFSI Sector what software do you provide and what is the experience across the globe?
We are working with large enterprises in India across the financial, manufacturing and IT sectors. We work with major System Integrators and will continue to increase our presence and awareness in the India market.
BFSI is one of our strongest segments. Our software and business proposition resonate strongly due to the critical nature of the data and applications; whilst we are strong in BFSI, our solutions are relevant to anyone that values business uptime; to that end we have market penetration across every major sector. The bottom line is that we are relevant to any organisation that doesn’t tolerate downtime in its business. Of course this is particularly relevant to the BFSI sector because downtime is quantifiable in terms of cost and data loss. For many regulated BFSI companies, penalties can be issued if they have downtime and/or data is lost; even seconds of data can be disastrous both in terms of regulation and customer satisfaction. Zerto prevents even seconds of data loss.
Director, Zerto
How do you compete with your rivals as you are new in the market? Share your experiences with us.
We are in a very fortunate position because we have unique elements to our technology that make us so different. We may not have such unique advantages forever but at the current time if you compare us with some of the biggest competitors who have hardware based replication; something that the banks have used for many years, they are behind what we can do when it comes a virtualised or cloud environments. They just can’t do the same things we can do in terms of mutually allowing you to recover back to any point in time down to seconds. They also can’t guarantee consistency in business critical applications that can be brought up quickly.
Our biggest challenge is not competition, it’s actually awareness and ensuring the right people in the right organisations are aware of our technology and solutions. When we do that, there is no one that can match what we do and usually those people want to invest in our technology.
Considering the growing competition amongst the start ups mainly because of Government of India’s initiatives to attract investors, what is your strategy to expand your business in India?
There is another feature particularly related to BFSI which is non-disruptive disaster recovery testing and for the financial sector it’s very important. For most BFSI companies they have stringent DR audits they need to undertake every year. Typically we see companies having to allocate weeks of time and resource to make sure the audit runs well and is successful. Companies that use Zerto can test DR with just the click of the button with no disruption or planning needed. Instead of testing once a year just for audit, Zerto users can test every week and have complete peace of mind that the DR solution is running properly. So for BFSI this is a big reason why they are looking at the Zerto solution. Also many companies, who are in the process of adopting virtualisation, moving from physical infrastructure to virtual space, start to look online to find new solutions because the old solution doesn’t work anymore.
Zerto is highly relevant to BFSI as it is unique in addressing many concerns in the sector. Our company works with various organisations and partners who address this market
How confident are you about the Indian market adopting Zerto’s solutions?
BFSI in India is ahead of the curve for virtualisation so it’s happening quickly in BFSI. As critical applications move into virtual environment they must be protected and there should be minimum downtime. India is in very early stage of cloud adoption, companies that invest in Zerto today for DR for their virtualised environment are buying into a technology that will replicate them into cloud when they are ready. A decision to work with Zerto is a long term winner because we become the platform that can move and protect business workloads between clouds and data centres.
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