As part of our effort to make the channel community better informed and get an earful of what the leading vendors are thinking, expecting, and planning for the channel community in 2022, we have started this new section to record the channel predictions of the most prominent players of the IT industry.
Here, as part of this special series of Tech Forecasts, Commvault India registers its predictions for 2022.
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“Partners will have to align their strategies to capture expanded opportunities to service the customers. They will also need to develop different skillsets to succeed in the market with its variegated offerings and deep expertise within the areas most valued by customers.”
Anshuman Rai,
Area Vice President, India, and South Asia,
Commvault
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Commvault’s Anshuman Rai, who as Area Vice President for India & South Asia, oversees the company’s operations and growth strategy across India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, had spoken to SME Channels. With over 20 years of deep tech expertise, Anshuman leads a highly driven and passionate team. His role encompasses growing the market share and driving healthy ecosystem growth among both customers and partners in the region.
Anshuman has donned several roles in his previous stints and managed multiple responsibilities and businesses – large and small including dynamic start-ups, with a focus on selling products and services.
Prior to joining Commvault, Anshuman started and built the UiPath business in India, a company that grew from $ 30M to one of the most stellar IPOs of 2021 with close to $ 2B investment in total. He had built a culture of collaboration, accountability, ownership, and trust within and across teams which resulted in consistently high performance.
In a special interaction with SME Channels, Anshuman Rai, Area Vice President, India, and South Asia, Commvault, shares his company’s Channel Predictions for the year 2022. Edited excerpts…
Give a brief introduction of Commvault.
Commvault give businesses the peace of mind that liberates businesses to do amazing things with data. We simplify and manage the complexity of our customers’ data, uncovering insights, accelerating their growth, and helping to ensure the fundamental integrity of their business. With technology excellence at our core, we continue to lead the market with our Intelligent Data Services Platform.
Today, we deliver our Intelligent Data Services as software on-premises; in the cloud; as a managed service through partners; or as SaaS—a critical differentiator in the market. We are uniquely positioned to address the critical uses cases customers encounter on their transformation journeys.
We’ve been at the forefront of innovation for our rich 25-year history and recognize that customers need flexibility and choice. As we go into 2022 and beyond, we will continue to expand and unify our full set of data management offerings across Metallic and Commvault, in line with the growing needs of enterprises for cloud-delivered data management and protection.
As the pandemic is still there and a new variant has surfaced, what are the major market trends you are forecasting for 2022?
With digital transformation plans continuing to pivot due to the ongoing global pandemic, there is a greater need for speed, agility, and security for uninterrupted business operations. Resilience will form the core of all data management strategies to rapidly combat a threat and a robust backup and recovery plan must be in place to secure the organization’s critical data.
We will see how enterprises bring DevOps’ agility to data management. These DevOps teams will combine software developers with IT operations staff into a single group focused on application development and improvement. In doing so DevOps teams will enable enterprises to implement agile software development methodologies, shortening application development times and speeding the improvement of applications on an ongoing basis. Businesses will also be working towards gaining control over data sprawl to be able to secure the fundamental integrity of their business and accelerate their digital transformation efforts.
In 2021, we saw companies completing the second lap of their cloud journeys by outsourcing management of the application infrastructure. This year, we will witness partnerships with cloud Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to help these companies effectively manage the set-up, customization, and administration of their cloud-based applications, expanding revenue opportunities for IT service providers.
The SaaS dynamics has changed completely amidst the pandemic, as we now know the benefits of subscription-based models. As enterprises will strive to empower their agile workforce with a secure, fast and reliable data ecosystem, Data Management-as-a-service (DMaaS) will be crucial in keeping a federated view and control of their data to ensure that their IT infrastructures remain protected, compliant and cost-effective.
What major trends are you forecasting in the channel market?
As enterprises, big and small, continue to leverage technology to drive business growth, the onus is on channel partners to imbibe and align their strategies to capture expanded opportunities to service the customers. There will also be a need to develop different skillsets to increase their chances for success in the market with its variegated offerings and deep expertise within the areas most valued by customers.
Cloud will remain a top opportunity driver for channel partners with small to medium businesses opting for affordable and feature rich MSP cloud offerings to accelerate their transition to cloud. The rollout of 5G will enable bring a whole new array of possibilities to channel partners in terms of traction in the marketplace and we will see a rise in Partner Experience (PX) strategies to build, sustain and drive channel growth.
What is your expectation from your channel ecosystem this year? Which areas you want to focus in the channel – skillsets – sales and marketing, vertical and technology practice development, service capability, etc.?
The Channel is a significant layer to Commvault’s go-to-market strategy. We are a partner-led organization and we co-sell with our channel partners. The Channel market growth certainly has a positive outlook and the same will continue as more organizations are embracing digitalization at a faster pace.
In 2022, we will continue to grow our data management channel in India, with Metallic SaaS data protection technology as it offers every digital enterprise – guaranteed cloud data protection and backup as a service ensuring flexibility and scalability in the hybrid cloud market.
As a channel-led company, nurturing and evolving our strong partner ecosystem is critical to everything we do at Commvault, and is a key priority for our Global Partner Organization. To empower our partners, we have created a simple, streamlined program with all of the critical tools, training, and innovative solutions that drive our partners’ business opportunities – further strengthening our partnerships and joint success.
Are you planning any new product addition for the channel market?
We have recently launched Metallic – our award-winning solution of SaaS backup and recovery offerings, in India. Metallic provides simple, flexible and integrated data protection for cloud and hybrid cloud workloads as opposed to point products that solve only part of the problem. Metallic’s capabilities, including breadth of coverage for SaaS applications, endpoints, hybrid cloud datacenter workloads, and its unique SaaS Plus storage flexibility eliminate the need for disparate point solutions and siloed data. With simplified management, reduced infrastructure costs and faster time to value for customers, Metallic provides quick and easy protection for all data with a simple, easy-to-use BaaS model.
