Altaro – international success by local young talent

Founded in 2009, Altaro grew rapidly over the years with their flagship solution Altaro VM Backup, which gained traction as the natural choice for Hyper-V and VMware VM backups.

Altaro is still very much a growing business and therefore regularly needs new talent. Their open vacancies can be found on their website at www.altaro.com/careers.

How did Altaro start and what are your products?

Altaro was born seven years ago when the four of us got together and realised that between us, we had all the key skills and experience to start our own business. With backgrounds in product development, marketing, management and software engineering, we joined forces and formed Altaro Software. Today, we have more than 30 people in the team and we’re looking to add many more. 

When we started out, we recognised a growing need for good backup and recovery software for the home PC user. With this market in mind, we developed our first product, which made it simple for users to automatically recover any lost files. In 2011, we pivoted from consumers to small and medium sized businesses and thanks to our talented local development and testing team we released our first solution for backing up virtual servers and this is when things took off for us.  

How many international users has Altaro managed to acquire during its seven years in the market?

We have over 30,000 customers using our software around the world, out of which 35% are based in the United States, 15% are UK-based and 12% are in Germany. These include well known businesses and institutions such as Harvard University, the New Zealand Defence Force, Princeton University, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, Mitsubishi Polyester Film and many more.  

How has the company managed to expand not only across Europe but also across the US?

From the outset, we’ve been very focused on selling our products to an international audience.  To do this we knew we had to build a fantastic team with the required skillsets. We place lots of focus on online marketing to get the word out and encourage users to run trials of our software. Alongside this, we strongly believe in building a channel-sales model, and currently have a network of over 4,000 resellers worldwide. We also have our own, talented sales team who focus on our key countries. 

Moreover, the level of customer service we provide at Altaro has played a major role in our success; we pride ourselves on a world class support team who engage customers by phone, email and live chat quicker and more effectively than most of our international competitors.

What careers do you offer at Altaro both locally and internationally?

As a software company, naturally, many of our roles are IT-based such as developers, engineers and testers. However, sales and marketing skills are also highly valued and we seek people with these skills in particular. We also need people with the mind-set required for international business. Our head office is based in Malta but we also have roles held in other countries such as the US and the UK.

What do you envision for your company for the near future?

Over the next few years we are due to continue our expansion plans. This would include opening new offices in both the UK and US. Our goal is to become a recognised brand worldwide and so we’re investing heavily in our marketing activities such as attending and sponsoring trade shows in the US, Barcelona, Germany and other regions, as well as nearly doubling our worldwide marketing budget. 

We can achieve these goals by investing in our team and by providing a great and flexible work environment. Our aim is to always get people on board who are better than us in their areas, to continually help us grow and improve together as a company.