Tech Insights: Interview with Don Williams, Veeam

What do you see as the single biggest challenge facing the ICT industry in the year ahead, and why?

I would see the biggest challenge is finding that balance between doing more with less and achieving more with the budgets IT departments currently have. In my conversations with CIOs and IT department heads, most battle with freeing up time and budget to drive innovation within the business.

These days almost every company has evolved into a software company in some shape or form, whose data and applications need to be available at all times. That can tie up lots of resource just to keep the lights on.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2016, and why?

Challenges are often opportunities as well, and as mentioned earlier, the ability to free up budgets from legacy solutions to drive more innovation and value into the business is a real opportunity for our customers. Growth is driven by innovation, and innovation is enabled by the freedom to express yourself, without being shackled by maintenance requirements.

We also see a significant opportunity for our customers and channel partners in cloud services, particularly through affordable and efficient cloud-based disaster recovery. We are seeing demand for DRaaS strongly intensify.

What emerging trends or developing technologies may influence or change the way the ICT industry will do business in 2016, and why?

We are in the age of the always-on enterprise and mission-critical applications are everywhere. In fact, it's no longer a case of asking “which applications are mission critical?" Every application has to be highly available, which makes business continuity key and the DRaaS opportunity significant. Likewise, effective enterprise mobility will continue to influence the way we do business as organisations strive to connect any user, from any device, anywhere in the world.

What are your customers demanding of you more today than five years ago, and how will you meet these requirements in 2016?

Five years ago, larger enterprise customers expected technology products to be complex. Now, they expect them to just work. The days when a business would employ project teams to deploy a technology over 12–18 months are gone. They don't have the time; they need solutions that deliver value from day one.

Aside from your own, which ICT companies will be the ones to watch in 2016, and why?

Disruption is what is constant in the IT space — and like most of us working in technology, I'd be keen to see the new entrants in the market that will challenge the status quo. Of course, everyone is looking to see how Dell's acquisition of EMC pans out and it's an exciting time for the newly birthed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, but we are also looking forward to the innovations coming out of the major storage vendors to cope with and manage today's avalanche of data.

Don Williams is Veeam's Vice President for ANZ, based in Sydney. Don is responsible for overall business operations, sales and business development for the region, with a focus on growing the company's market share in the virtualisation, disaster recovery and cloud software markets.