How does your marketing experience with VMware, which is focused on virtualization and the cloud, and Qlik, which is focused on data analytics, help you with Veeam?

In both cases, I entered a company that was transactional-based and selling very small, targeted solutions. And in both cases, we recognized the need to get much stronger at selling to the enterprise to become more of an enterprise platform. At VMware, it was continuing to expand the technology we already had. But really, it was about better messaging, better positioning, sales enablement, channel enablement, and getting the market to think of us as more than virtualization. And that’s where we started the journey to the cloud and cloud infrastructure, etc. At Qlik, we basically built a strategy which they called active intelligence. Then we did two years of M&A to build against that strategy, and then repositioned the company as more of an end-to-end data integration and analytics and automation platform. It was a lot of acquisitions, re-architecting, moving it all to the cloud, and then repositioning the company.

[Veeam has] a platform that covers SaaS, cloud native workloads, on-premises, physical servers, virtual workloads. So we have a lot of the elements. We just need to package it a little bit better together and then position ourselves more appropriately that way. And then have to drive more awareness around the fact that we are very successful as an enterprise player in the market. So expect to see a lot of investment in awareness next year for the company.

So it’s kind of similar in terms of what needs to be done. It’s just every company I’ve been at has a slightly different starting point and therefore dictates a slightly different set of priorities. But I like what we’ve got to work with here. I think there’s low hanging fruit we can take advantage of that we’re starting to look at right now. But a lot of this is just positioning and driving awareness around what it is we do and how we do it.