Despite facing a tumultuous global environment in 2020, Own persevered and wrapped up a banner year that included new leadership, and impressive awards—ranking #79 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ list and #25 on The Financial Times’ first annual Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies list. To top things off, earlier this year we raised $167.5M in new funding, bringing our cumulative funding over $267.5M to date and our valuation into unicorn territory.
This success story stretches well beyond Americas’ borders though. While we’re best known as a Salesforce data protection solution in the United States, we’ve recently invested in new expansion across Asia Pacific and Europe, supporting growing customer demand for SaaS data protection in these markets. In fact, of Own’s more than 3,000 customers worldwide, more than 29% are based outside the U.S., with a rapidly growing list of well known brands in the UK and Europe.
France, in particular, has been an area of focus for us over the past several months as we continue our journey. We recently chatted with Gareth Morris, Vice President of Sales & GM EMEA, about Own’s plans in France for the coming year. Below are highlights from our conversation.
Can you tell us about the recent investments Own has made in EMEA and France in particular?
We have added several key hires to the team over the last few months, including Eric Rispaud who brings a proven track record of cloud-first expertise from Accenture and Capgemini to his new role as Director of Alliances at Own. Salesforce veteran Nessim Makhloufi takes the role of Regional Vice President, Enterprise South EMEA, fresh from his role as RVP South EMEA at COUPA Software. Stephen Terry joins us from a Salesforce SI Partner having previously led cloud sales teams with Salesforce and SAP, taking the role of Area Vice President of Commercial Sales EMEA. Finally, Andrew Hart joined the business in January as Director of Technical Architects to exponentially expand the Professional Services team and to help our customers address a broad range of cloud data, compliance and governance needs.
As we build on our early success in the French market and in Europe in general - EMEA ACV grew by 129% in 2020 - we are focused on our customers’ success and needs. We have a fantastic reputation for our customer support and our dedicated local resources will ensure we maintain those high standards as we grow. It’s important to achieve our revenue goals, but it’s even more of a priority to support our customers effectively now and into the future.
Why is the French market so important?
As Salesforce’s largest territory outside the US and UK, France is a huge opportunity for Own. We have a great foundation to build on with some amazing brands and growing market share, particularly in the business services and financial services space. We also have our sights set on a number of other core verticals, including manufacturing.
Leading French companies are powering their digital transformations with Salesforce. As they invest further and add complexity to their infrastructures, there is an opportunity for Own to help protect their data and meet compliance needs. With the Salesforce economy projecting 154,000 new direct jobs in France for customers and partners by 2024, this is a market we’re excited to serve.
Can you share how some of our French customers are using our solutions?
Based in Paris, Zenconnect is a cloud service provider specialising in network infrastructure, providing innovative and agile solutions to customers across the globe. As a leader in its field, the company needed best-in-class solutions to unify critical data across the organisation. Customer information—from customer contacts and business data to methods of contact, insights, and ticketing information—is all housed in Salesforce.
When the team implemented Own, they immediately noticed the value of having a comprehensive backup and recovery solution in place to protect this vital customer data. Using our platform, Zenconnect is now able to modify and extract client data without violating GDPR, search for a singular piece of data within a large-scale data set, and restore data in a timely fashion. Not only is the team able to meet their commitment to customers, they have peace of mind knowing their data is protected.
Several other French and European customers use our Recover, Archive and Sandbox Seeding solutions, such as Highco, Babilou, Delivery Hero, Yakult, and many others in the manufacturing, retail, and business services space.
What is your vision for the future in this region?
The use of cloud services continues to accelerate, and although adoption in France has lagged behind other countries, we’re now starting to see SaaS solutions gaining traction. As companies expand their cloud ecosystems, the need for a more comprehensive backup and recovery solution becomes more urgent, and we’re ready to meet growing demand.
We are continuing to hire at a rapid pace in EMEA after an extremely successful 2020 where we saw more than 120% growth despite the uncertain climate. The key leadership hires we have in place for 2021 show our commitment to success in this region. We’re just getting started and I’m excited about the year ahead!
