Brett Waters VP Sales for Australia and New Zealand, OwnBackup

As OwnBackup Ltd. continues to grow, the firm welcomes Brett Waters to our team as the company’s first VP sales for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

He will be helping to serve and expand the already 100+ base of happy customers in the region. He joins with over 25 years of experience in international software businesses including Conga, where he most recently served as GM of APAC, as well as SMS Magic, NewVoiceMedia, and RightNow Technologies.

Here are the answers of Waters to some questions:

What are some of your interests outside of work?
I am married with 4 daughters and a Cavoodle called Molly. I enjoy reading, photography, golf, and genealogy. In fact, my maternal grandfather many times removed earned himself a free trip to Australia on the First Fleet back in 1788.

Why are you excited to join?
Joining OwnBackup during this hyper-growth period is exciting. It’s a privilege to be part of building an ANZ team and leveraging that growth to help meet the needs of our customers in this part of the world.

Why is the company focusing on this market?
There is a huge opportunity for growth in Australia and New Zealand. Just like in the US, Salesforce CRM is the dominant player here, and every Salesforce customer could benefit from the peace of mind that OwnBackup’s data protection solutions offer. The value we bring to Salesforce customers is evidenced by the fact that we have over 320 five-star reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Can you share examples of customers having success in the region already?
29% of OwnBackup’s customer base is headquartered outside the US, and many of those clients are here in Australia and New Zealand. Two that I’ve been especially excited to learn about are the financial services business Athena Home Loans and the non-profit Activ Foundation. Athena Home Loans is one of Australia’s fastest-growing FinTechs. Enabled by a modern digital platform, Athena is able to provide superior returns for investors and much lower interest rates for borrowers. With Salesforce as the core system powering its business, Athena requires a robust data protection strategy. Their engineering team relies on OwnBackup to not only eliminate potential data loss (keeping loan and revenue cycles rolling), but to maintain the privacy of customer data during sandbox seeding (so they can develop and innovate faster).

“As a digital business, we would cease to exist if we lost our data. With OwnBackup, we can ensure BC to our stakeholders, and we’re managing our risk in a much smarter way,” said Peter Georgiou, CTO, Athena.

Activ has been supporting people living with intellectual and developmental disability in Western Australia since 1951. After some issues with corruption of data in their previous on-prem CRM system, they chose OwnBackup as a piece of their data assurance puzzle to protect the large amounts of client data they store in their new cloud-based solution. Now, the team can identify, recover, and restore data and associated metadata if corruption happens, and even work on new projects without ever exposing customer data.

“Having the ability to seed a sandbox and anonymise any type of data, all via OwnBackup, is invaluable,” said Mike Dunn, head of technology, Activ.

How will OwnBackup expand its presence in ANZ?
We are planning for rapid expansion, so we’re assembling motivated and enthusiastic people to help capitalise on the current market opportunity. This will include more than a dozen team members locally, and a physical office in Sydney early next year (or as soon as is practical, given pandemic conditions).