James Wright (Cloudian)
Cloudian’s Asia Pacific operations have helped it withstand the last 12 months of harsh conditions generated by rising interest rates and the global economic slowdown.
Speaking to ARN, Cloudian’s senior director for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), James Wright, said that although tough economic conditions were hitting global markets, the company’s Asian business has helped it tough things out.
“This year has been difficult because of the rising interest rates and slowing down of the economy. But having said that, I think the Asian countries have really buffeted our business because there hasn't really been that type of slowdown in Southeast Asia and Asia,” he said to ARN.
Wright entered his current role in December last year, stepping up from regional director of Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), Oceania and ASEAN. At the time, Wright was tasked with growing a range of Asian markets, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Korea.
After being in the position for close to a year, Wright said the added responsibility has been a great challenge.
“Taking those strategies and taking the go-to-market and route-to-market strategies that I've been using for A/NZ and ASEAN for a while and applying those to some of the countries that I haven't transacted with in the past has been fantastic,” he said.
While the methods used are largely universal, Wright added that they’re all customised to each country. Part and parcel of these tailored strategies are Cloudian’s partners.
“The general strategy gets looked at and gets reviewed, and then we customise that from country to country; Malaysia is different to Thailand, different to Vietnam, different to the Philippines and Singapore,” Wright said. “The general tenants of distribution, partner and service providers are always in there, but that has been tweaked. That's really been where we've seen a growth in our in our partnerships.”
While Cloudian has a number of financial clients around the globe, the business’ A/NZ operations however are just starting to see interest in its solutions from the banking sector.
“It's starting to really emerge, that putting the first copy of your object and file storage into an on-prem data store is super important, and maybe putting your final copy into a secondary location on Cloudian or a secondary location into a public cloud is certainly something that is becoming more prevalent,” Wright said. “Tape replacements continue to be a very good business for us, and and our focus for our business.”
Additionally, in Australia, there’s been a large focus on Cloudian partners and their customers on progressing through the Essential Eight cyber security maturity model, but that spotlight on cyber security has been noticed across the larger APAC region.
“Where we’re assisting is the data immutability piece, which is essential to reach a certain maturity level,” Wright added. “This is a really positive step for the channel and Australia’s broader cyber security posture and we’re seeing the same trend across New Zealand and ASEAN – without immutability, it’s like you’ve got a safe at home but you’re not putting your valuables in it.”
