Business

Wasabi Reinforces Commitment to EMEA With the Appointment of Jon Howes as General Manager

Wasabi Technologies strengthened its foothold in EMEA with the appointment of Jon Howes as Vice President and General Manager for EMEA. Howes will build on Wasabi’s momentous growth in the region, highlighted by a flagship deal with Liverpool Football Club, 1,800 new partners, and a nearly 90% ARR growth rate.

Additionally, a full region go-to-market team has been established to support the growth of cloud storage, with Eric Peters as Country Manager of Benelux & Southern Europe based in France; Daniel Arabié, Country Manager of Central Europe/DACH based in Germany, and Kevin Dunn, Country Manager for the UK/I & Nordics based in the UK.

Jon Howes, VP and GM for EMEA, Wasabi Technologies, said:
“Demand for predictably priced, secure, high-performance cloud storage is growing at an unprecedented pace in EMEA, making Wasabi a perfect fit for the market. Our immense traction across Europe is a testament to the value we bring to enterprises and organisations across sports, media and entertainment, surveillance, education, healthcare, and more. Being at the helm of Wasabi’s EMEA operations is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I look forward to the expansion of Wasabi hot cloud storage in this important region along with our industry-leading team.”

Howes brings more than 20 years’ experience to Wasabi, with deep expertise in scaling go-to-market models for technology companies in EMEA including Juniper Networks, Oracle and Infovista. His initial priorities will be growing Wasabi’s channel presence, scaling its partner and customer base, and strategically increasing Wasabi’s headcount in key European markets, specifically the UK, France and Germany.

Meanwhile, Wasabi’s newly appointed country managers hold a plethora of proven sales and channel experience with organisations including AWS, Cloudian, EMC, Juniper Networks, Nimble Storage, and others.

Wasabi’s ‘channel-first’ approach in EMEA has established partnerships with Exclusive Networks, Ebertlang, Veeam, Equinix, and more – most recently Skill Partner. Marquee customer wins include Liverpool Football Club, who migrated to Wasabi for predictable, affordable cloud storage without fees for egress or API requests in order to create a central repository for all the club’s digital media.

Drew Crisp, SVP of Digital at Liverpool Football Club, said:
“Many cloud vendors try to be all things to all people, to the customer’s detriment. Wasabi’s singular focus on cloud storage has made them brilliant at what they do. They know the cloud storage space inside and out and have worked with us every step of the way. Not only does Liverpool FC have a very simple cost model with Wasabi as we migrate from on-premises to the cloud, we have price predictability that enables us to truly understand our total cost of ownership, which is essential for us.”

Wasabi hot cloud storage is the industry’s most reliable, scalable, and predictably priced cloud storage with no fees for egress or API requests and no vendor lock-in. Wasabi is gaining market traction at a phenomenal pace as organisations globally are looking for cloud storage solutions that fit their budgets and unique needs. It’s also an ideal product for the channel because every organisation needs to store data and Wasabi is simple to understand and integrate with other best-of-breed products. It also offers the highest level of protection in cloud storage with Object Lock immutability and 11 x 9s of data durability.

Service launched in EMEA in 2019 with the opening of the Amsterdam storage region. Since then, Wasabi has added storage regions in London, Frankfurt, and Paris to support the company’s rapid growth and to meet customer data sovereignty needs.

Arnaud Semont, Associate Director at Skill Partner, said:
“Skill Partner goes to market with innovative, disruptive and predictable IT solutions, which is why we partner with Wasabi on our backup and disaster recovery services. We use Wasabi cloud storage to keep an external copy of our customers’ data using immutable storage, which ensures data is safe from ransomware with object lock. As a system integrator and service provider based in EMEA, Wasabi’s local storage regions help us meet data sovereignty requirements, allowing us to use the Wasabi Paris storage region with replication to Frankfurt.”

Companies in every industry can benefit from Wasabi hot cloud storage and its suite of supporting products and tools like the recently announced Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, which delivers bottomless storage for video surveillance, and a state-of-the-art Carbon Footprint Calculator that helps customers and partners accurately measure and report on their energy use in specific Wasabi data centres as part of their broader ESG objectives.