by Bjorn Engelhardt, VP, Strategic Sales & Cloud – Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec
Recently, myself and our new Symantec AR manager for APJ, Sancharini Mazumdar, ‘met’ online with a number of our key regional analysts to offer some insights into Symantec’s latest announcements and provide an update on the ‘Symantec Vision 2013’ for the region. Much of this vision is about solving customers’ largest unmet and under-served needs, while reducing complexity and increasing simplification.
This is all very much part of the revolution taking place within Symantec right now, the core of which is based on delivering more value for our customers – whether they be consumers, small businesses, large enterprises or countries all around the world. What will this revolution be based on? Most importantly, the goal of better meeting customer needs through internal innovation and driving faster organic growth. And it’s not about a few tweaks here and there; it’s about transforming the whole company, organisation wide.
One message we’ve heard loud and clear from our customers and partners is that they want us to be easier to do business with. The Symantec 4.0 strategy is our way of responding to those demands; our chance to get this absolutely right.
To that end, we are working to improve the customer experience, by making the using of our products even better and easier, while also investing in our technical support capabilities to improve the experience. Most of all, we will offer our customers the ability to consume more and more of our capabilities across deployment options – software, appliance, software as a service (SaaS), and a hybrid between those form factors. We're also going to be launching a set of new offerings that are broader, more integrated and target higher-value customer needs: what I would call the ’high order jobs’. I will keep you posted as these come to market, of course.
But back to the analyst webcast. Some interesting questions came up during the webcast. We were asked what is our strategy to win back market share from competitors when it comes to backup and recovery.
Its an important and interesting market to be. The more data we create the more we need to ensure business continuity. I recognise that there are multiple niche players in the backup and recovery market , each talking about their own unique solutions to address this customer need.
We welcome that challenge and believe our strategy going forward will ensure that Symantec’s backup and recovery solutions continue to provide customers with exactly what they tell us they’re looking – a platform to handle customers’ various workloads (physical, virtual, multiple array stacks or big data warehouse) and platform infrastructure (disk, tape, appliances and cloud), helping them to address the many challenges they face at their data centres, remote offices and for disaster recovery planning. These customer needs sit firmly within the ‘higher order’ sphere I mentioned and form a critical part of Symantec 4.0.
On which note, we are pleased to report a strong growth in the APJ region for Symantec’s backup and recovery solutions with our launch of NBU 7.5/ BE 2012 and backup appliances, introduced to the majority of our APJ countries. I’m very optimistic that the appliances will gain further momentum across the APJ regions, as we now provide our customers with an alternative form factor and one integrated backup solution.
What we are particularly pleased about is the way in which our business has been growing across the region for some years – and we see Symantec 4.0 as a step towards increasing such growth. That said, we would also stress that APJ is not one, single business, with one need, but rather a holding company for many different businesses, with very relevant individual strategies for each of the growth countries. We’ve also identified very clear opportunities within each of these that Symantec 4.0 will help them to exploit, ensuring that growth continues and that we deliver to our customers the solutions that they want, in precisely the way they want them.
You can watch the replay of the Analyst Webcast here and please feel free to contact Sancharini Mazumdar, APJ Analyst Relations should you have any questions.