Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Arcserve?

Arcserve is taking on the global data protection market. In a major move, the company completed its merger with StorageCraft earlier this year - a transformation that's already been met with positivity from industry analysts and customers alike.

Leo Lynch, Director of Sales for APAC, spoke to 10 Minute IT Jams about how the merger is shaping a new chapter for Arcserve. He explained that "Arcserve and StorageCraft have both been around in the backup and recovery markets for more than 15 years, individually in each right." Historically, Arcserve has focused its efforts through value-added resellers (VARs) towards enterprise clients, while StorageCraft has gone to market through managed service providers (MSPs), primarily serving small to medium and mid-market businesses.

This complementary approach, Lynch said, made for a strong cultural and operational fit. "Seventy percent of our two and a half thousand resellers across Australia and New Zealand are MSPs, so it's been more of an MSP monthly selling motion into the SMB and mid-market. Actually quite complementary in the fact that they're in the same segment - backup, recovery, business continuity - but going into different segments and through different partners."

Market reaction to the merger has also been notable. "Gartner announced Arcserve after the merger as a challenger in their 2021 Magic Quadrant for enterprise backup and recovery," said Lynch. "That shifted from the previous year from a niche player up to challenger, and also IDC says that once the merger has gone through it will make us in the top five global vendors for backup recovery worldwide."

For customers in Australia and New Zealand, the move means a broader suite of solutions, with a clear focus on flexibility and scalability. Lynch was eager to outline the breadth of Arcserve's offerings, now enhanced by the StorageCraft integration. "Arcserve have traditionally been on-premise and a lot of StorageCraft legacy products have been in the cloud. But we try and focus on use cases from a customer's pain point perspective," he explained.

Arcserve's products now cover cloud, hybrid, and traditional deployments, with solutions ranging from disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), which recently migrated to Google Cloud for better bandwidth and performance in Australia and New Zealand, to backup as a service, SaaS protection, and unified data protection for complex enterprise environments.

The inclusion of StorageCraft's OneSafe storage device, Lynch noted, has proved "complementary and...a lot of success, particularly in Europe and North America, where they've been sold together. Bringing it together, we can just about do anything - and I know a lot of vendors will say that, but we can actually deliver it."

Key to the delivery, he emphasised, is Arcserve's "100 percent channel focus," working hand in glove with partners. "We are solely dependent on partners bringing those solutions together and delivering them to our clients, whether they be SMB, mid-market or enterprise," Lynch said.

Discussing the channel-first approach in the ANZ region, Lynch was clear on the benefits: "We have direct presence in New Zealand and direct presence in Australia. We have sales people in New Zealand, we have pre-sales presence in New Zealand as well as Australia," he said. "Now that we're one company, it brings direct presence for Arcserve across the board into both Australia and New Zealand, which is great for channel partners."

Arcserve's promise to partners includes market-leading margins and focused support, avoiding over-distribution to protect partner interests. "We're aligned with the channel," Lynch explained. "We won't sell against the channel, we'll sell with them in a collaborative channel fashion. We call it selling with partners."

On a broader note, Lynch reflected on trends transforming the backup and recovery market, particularly the convergence of security and business continuity. He said, "One of the key things I saw, and this was actually pre-COVID but probably accelerated more by COVID, was that people always thought of security over here and backup and recovery, business continuity over there. They're actually part of the same conversation." Lynch advised that "security is about keeping the baddies out…and when all is said and done, you want your data back as close as possible to the breach or corruption date, and you want it quickly."

Cloud adoption, spurred by COVID-19, continues to disrupt the sector. "We've seen across Australia and New Zealand more than 30 to 50 percent growth in our cloud backup and DRaaS services," Lynch said. Arcserve's own research found that 45 percent of survey respondents in ANZ expected to accelerate cloud adoption as a direct result of the pandemic. However, Lynch was quick to warn organisations that simply putting data in the cloud "doesn't mean that they're backing it up for you...Microsoft actually say it's your data, you choose to do what you want with it." As a result, Arcserve has increased its focus on customer education around cloud backup best practices.

Looking to the future, Lynch predicted even greater integration between data protection and security tools, alongside closer alliances with MSPs and new technological innovations. "Arcserve has always realised the importance of security and integration with that," he said, citing strong partnerships and upcoming releases, including "a backup recovery appliance native to Nutanix" and more tailored solutions in response to the threat landscape.

Summing up Arcserve's direction, Lynch concluded: "Backup recovery is now part of security. Therefore, I need a whole package...and you'll be seeing us trying to address those pain points for our customers more and more."