Keepit new global channels VP: ‘Partners need to share our belief that the future is Software as a Service’

Jan Ursi sits down with CRN after his appointment in September to talk why the UKI is a “priority one investment country” for the vendor

Keepit has a new vice president of global channels with a strong belief in the future of Software as a Service (SaaS).

Jan Ursi joined the SaaS data protection vendor last month from Rubrik where he spent the last five and a half years.

Ursi has 20 years of IT channel experience and so knows a thing or two about what technology trends are shaping the future of the market.

Speaking with CRN about why he made the jump from Rubrik, Ursi explains he had a keen eye on the data protection and data security space.

“It’s very meaningful to help customers in their darkest hour when data is destroyed or data is not available.”

Data on-premise in traditional datacentres is growing 20 to 40 per cent annually, Ursi claims.

But this pales to the explosion of data on public cloud infrastructure, where people are building cloud applications in Azure or Amazon and annual growth is already between 50 and 100 per cent, he adds.

“But if you then compare that to the velocity of data growth in SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Google workspace, Okta and Salesforce etc, the annual growth there is between 100 and 200 per cent,” he says.

“So the area where the data growth is most explosive is in the area of Software as a Service environment, and Keepit is right at the centre of that evolution.

“They've chosen to specialise in protecting SaaS applications where the data growth is the fastest, and where the realisation of enterprises and public services teams is also materialising that they need to do something to protect that data.”

Right talent, right partnerships

Ursi admits he’s “still a little bit on his heels” in the new role, but nevertheless lays out his short-term priorities.

“My goal right now is to get the right people on board as we build our international expansion.

“My second point is around coverage.

“Once you have the talent on board, you have to make some quick decisions where you point that talent too.

“One of the things that I see immediately at Keepit is that the solution can cover multiple types of partnerships.

“VARs are interested in selling term-based contracts. Service providers want to have a consumption agreement so that they can sell it as a managed service. OEM partners want to resell our technology as their own.”

Ursi says that, with all these different types of partnerships, the moment you have your talent onboard, you need to place your bets on where you go first.

“We went to the VARs first. That was a very quick uptick. At this moment, almost half our pipeline we're generating together with these VARs.

“Now we have an MSP team because we see that consumption, billing and the MSP motion is growing very quickly. It's one of the fastest growing in our go-to-market.”

UKI is number one

Ursi describes the UK and Ireland as a “very important market” for Keepit”, adding it is a

“priority one investment country” for the vendor for a number of reasons.

“It’s a large market with a large GDP and a large number of enterprise and public services that are consuming SaaS applications,” he explains.

“The growth of SaaS adoption in UKI is very significant, and that means there's a big opportunity for us specialised in protecting these SaaS applications.”

Last year Keepit opened a local office in the region and built a datacentre.

Since then, Ursi claims the Copenhagen-HQ vendor has quickly seen partners wanting to operate with Keepit.

“There were four things these partners told us from the UK market.

“One is that although the UK is not part of the European Union anymore there's a lot of interaction with the EU, so they need to make sure they are compliant with regulations like DORA and NIS2.

“UK companies want to ensure that SaaS data is being held within the region, and that they are compliant to GDPR and all these compliance and security standards.

“The only way for them to do that properly is to have the insurance that there is data sovereignty.”

The second thing is how competitive the market is.

“Partners quickly realised that with us, they can have a predictable margin.

“So for the UK and also for the rest of the world, we've created seed pricing, which is all inclusive, meaning there can be a predictable business model. They know exactly what their cost is, so that they can calculate for the coming years what the return of investment is.

“That's because we are not depending on a hyperscaler that is changing their storage costs and their storage charges. We have all of that within our own control.”

SaaS is the future

The conversation started with a view that all software will be delivered as a service in the future.

Ursi states he already sees a stagnation in the number of applications that are being custom built in the cloud, especially in the on-prem datacentre.

While the adoption of SaaS applications is going up very quickly, the trajectory is still on a linear scale.

“So we want to partner with value added resellers, MSPs, MSP aggregators, traditional distributors, OEM partners, all these different types of partners, but they need to share the belief together with us that the future is Software as a Service.

“So we will look for partners that are latching on to the SaaS growth, that are even taking bold decisions like no longer investing in the on-prem datacentres.

“It’s a bold statement and maybe a little bit controversial, but partners that see this tendency for enterprises to not be bothered with building applications and maintaining databases, whether it be on-prem or in the cloud, but just want to focus on their core business, and they want to consume software as a service.

“That future is where you also need protection of that SaaS data. And that's where Keepit comes in.”