For Commvault, a maker of enterprise data management solutions, this calendar year saw significant moves in support of a partner-led strategy, simplified product portfolio. According to Huzefa iMotiwala, Senior Director, Systems Engineering, APAC at Commvault, innovation remains the hallmark behind Commvault’s product vision and leadership.
From an overall back up point of view including DC and Cloud, how was the calendar year for global and India market?
The calendar year has surely been an interesting one globally and for India. Apart from facing more data than ever, data is also leaving the data center and recognized to be one of the critical asset in an enterprise. A look into the secondary copy world, typically created by backup or archive operations, data has historically been retained for reasons to recover from data loss situation or disaster and to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements. Legal and regulatory compliance grown more complex. Cloud storage increasingly became the answer to challenges in enterprise scalability and security. Today’s enterprise data is sprawling out into the digital stratosphere, finding a home on public cloud infrastructure, with managed service providers, and within software-as-a-service solutions. Asia Pacific is anticipated to grow at the fastest CAGR owing to increasing awareness between industries to protect and backup their vital enterprise data, mainly in BFSI, IT & telecommunications, retail, and healthcare verticals boosts the market growth in this region.
How was your customer acquisition growth? What were the customer engagement programs of the year and what was the outcome?
Innovation remains the hallmark behind Commvault’s product vision and leadership. Needless to say our continuous investment into our converged data management solution redefines what backup means for the progressive enterprise through solutions that protect, manage, and use their most critical asset – their data. For us, this calendar year saw significant moves in support of a partner-led strategy, simplified product portfolio, entering into new alliance relationship with strategic alliance partners, as well as:
- The launch of a new Partner Success Desk, an improved Quote Center, a strong new Partner Demand Center, and updated Partner Portal, all in a multi-pronged effort to demonstrate its commitment to being a strong and committed partner for its expanding ecosystem.
- Our partner-led initiatives were creating momentum; announced new and enhanced strategic partnerships with AWS, Micrsoft Azure, Google Cloud, NetApp, HPE, Cisco, IBM, Alibaba Cloud, and Huawei
- Our customers and partners applauded the timeliness of Commvault’s offerings for GDPR use cases
- Smartly consolidated our backup & recovery and data management portfolio into four core products (CommvaultComplete Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale, Commvault Orchestrate and Commvault Activate), simplified our pricing structure and competitiveness and streamlined the process to take products to market from development through to sales. The result: Commvault’s products are easier for customer to buy and easier for partners to sell.
Which verticals embraced your solutions maximum and why?
The changing data landscape has put data at the core of every business. This data is getting bigger, more complicated, and more disparate every passing day. Today’s world of compliance, data breaches and disasters has put data protection on the business agenda, as organisations try to keep themselves “safe” and “compliant”. No industry verticals escape this changing data landscape. Our converged data management solution redefines what backup means for the progressive enterprise through solutions that protect, manage, and use their most critical asset – their data. We help companies worldwide manage, protect, activate and drive more value and business insights out of their data and to transform modern data environments.
Point some of CIO Challenges in 2018 from the infrastructure point of view. What was the experience of Commvault to mitigate those challenges?
Some CIO face the challenge of modernising their infrastructure to simultaneously protect their data and enable the business with data-driven decisions. We recommend a refresh way of thinking with these five keys to successful infrastructure modernisation:
- Know what you have and consolidate – despite the fact that businesses have access to so many new technologies, knowing where that data is, and how it’s used can be considerably difficult. Identifying business data, and its location, through one solidified solution is the first step toward effectively modernising business infrastructures.
- Use a flexible and agile data infrastructure – according to Gartner, it’s estimated that more than $200 billion in annual IT spending will shift to cloud-related categories in the next two years. However, as we virtualise and move to new cloud technologies, it’s easy to move too fast. To avoid backpedalling, businesses must ensure that they deploy flexible and agile data infrastructures, rather than being locked into specific infrastructures or vendors.
- Simplify operations and automate everything – ultimately, organisations need to get to a point where their data management, protection, and use operations are automated. Increasingly, this is being achieved through the use of AI and machine learning embedded into software, easing the burden on IT admins and enabling them to focus on IT as part of their business strategy and development
- Scale out economically – in addition, businesses should be moving away from silos and toward more seamless, software-defined storage solutions. In what has traditionally been a highly rigid and costly storage operation, Commvault HyperScale technology allows businesses to reduce complexity, increase agility, and lower cost.
- Make change easy – finally, as organisations move to consolidating their data, it’s important to have a clear and pragmatic path toward infrastructure modernisation. Having consultants as partners during this process can make it a whole lot easier for organisations on this journey.
What all products you rolled out in the year, what was the adoption rate of those new products?
- Smartly consolidated our backup & recovery and data management portfolio into four core products (CommvaultComplete Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale, Commvault Orchestrate and Commvault Activate), simplified our pricing structure and competitiveness and streamlined the process to take products to market from development through to sales. The result: Commvault’s products are easier for customer to buy and easier for partners to sell.
- Announced As-as-service portfolio for Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery to drive simplicity, ease of use and cost savings for customers
- New appliances to extend the power of Scale-out data management to enterprises, MSPs and Remote offices
- Commvault Activate now delivers insights that enable enterprises to know data location, type and profile with powerful indexing and reporting
How was the channel growth for Commvault? What are the channel programmes you had rolled out in the year?
We made things simpler for partners through reduced product complexity, better pricing, and enhanced enablement. Prior to our new approach, we had dozens of SKUs which we have reduced to four. We changed our pricing to be very simplified and to give partners greater choice. It became simple for partners to pick what pricing model to position for their approach to the market. We also simplified the messaging associated with that and the way we deliver enablement to make it rapid and easy for partners and customers to understand. We put in place a revised partner portal so partners can self-service more easily. This included making pricing tools simpler.
The feedback we are hearing from our partners has been overwhelmingly positive. They are telling us that we’ve fixed the pricing and it’s really easy. The configuration is dead simple. The partner success desk we rolled out means they receive an instantaneous response rather than waiting two days for someone to come back to them. Price quotations that may have taken hours, with additional approvals taking up to a day or so can now be pulled together in about 30 seconds and demonstrated on an iPhone.We’ve never seen pipeline growth like this in our history, and it is due to how rapidly the reseller community has responded. They are converting opportunities to Commvault because they think they have a higher win ratio, they see it as very rewarding, and they understand how easy it is to do business with us.
Name some of the best performing partners and why they were so good?
The most successful partners are those that can understand the customer challenges and their desired outcomes. We’re not in a part of the industry where simply shipping boxes is going to fix problems for customers. Partners that have a degree of technical domain or vertical domain expertise, understand the journey that customers are on and the outcomes they are trying to create, they are the ones that will better understand how to utilise Commvault. They’ll get better outcomes with those clients and they’ll have much better long-term relationships, which is where we prosper.
We’ve found that working on one application or solution set is only the beginning. We have customers that we’ve worked with for more than 20 years. Partners that have that same long term view and the ability to impact customer outcomes will be the most successful.
What kind of revenue/ market share growth you achieved this Year?
The trend we’re seeing is that people are looking to become more efficient and to leverage third party technologies. This is across infrastructure, managed services and cloud, either in a hybrid fashion or through moving entire workloads.
On the back of this there are more challenges than ever: ransomware, increase regulation and legislation, issues around data sovereignty and privacy. These issues are addressed through data management, data security, and disaster recovery, but now also automation – knowing your data through machine learning and artificial intelligence.
What all activities you did which differentiated you from the competition and helped you to increase market share?
We are excited to share that Gartner named us 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions. Gartner defines Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions as being focused on providing backup capabilities for the upper end mid-market and large-enterprise environments.
Some of the reviews that contributed to Commvault’s recognition include (see https://www.commvault.com/news/2018/november/commvault-recognized-for-2018-gartner-peer-insights-award):
- “Great company to work with… Wonderful support and service. Excellent product too,” said an information systems officer in the finance industry.
- “Before the [Commvault] backup solution we were using multiple solutions to back up our IT infrastructure, after the implementation of [Commvault] backup solution we were able to manage [our] entire infrastructure in a single console and even the VMs are taken care,” said a CIO in the finance industry.
- “A very good experience. No issues. They worked with us to backup all of our systems and synchronize our data between two data centers. They also helped us migrate our long term data to the cloud,” said a CIO/Director, Information Services in government.
- “Commvault offers a huge amount of settings and features [that] cover all the — from my perspective — imaginable business needs… Commvault has proven a stable and solid technology, which can be fine-tuned and customized at very extensive levels and offers exactly all the features we need,” said a CIO in the services industry.
“Hands down, the best backup solution available today…Nothing but good things to say about Commvault, in my opinion they are head and shoulders above everything else out there. It can back up pretty [much] anything out there to anywhere and is seamlessly managed from a central interface,” said a Systems Analyst III in the system integrator industry.
