What is the market sentiment now with slowdown in covid-19 cases?
The market sentiment is showing a positive outlook as we see a decline in covid-19 cases. Looking from the economic perspective, despite contraction last year, global organisations such as OECD have projected India’s economy to expand by 9.9% in the year 2021. This growth is fastest amongst all G20 economies. Moreover, the Indian Government also has taken up several initiatives to revive the economy.
If we look at the business side, there has been a huge demand & adoption of digitalisation globally. SMEs are adopting digital faster now than ever. Today, the practice of leveraging the data has gone beyond firm level, as it covers a wide spectrum of healthcare, banking and education at the community and country level.
The SaaS industry as a whole is the fastest growing software segment in the world and India is 1.5X faster than global SaaS market. The revenues stand at $3.5B in Fy2020 and growing at 30%. Commvault is also seeing record-breaking business growth both locally and globally, and we have more customers talking to us on how we can help them store, protect, optimise and use their data efficiently.
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f9f9f9″]
“Partners have been given the choice of ‘pay-as-you-go’ options for software licensing or more long-term purchases with higher discounts.”
Praveen Sahai,
VP, Channels,
Alliances & Service Provider for Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ),
Commvault.
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Which are the sectors likely to drive and contribute to your business?
The spectrum of industries who rely on Commvault is large. Today, more than 1 00,000 organisations ranging from small to large enterprises, trust Commvault to overcome their data hurdles and grow their business with industry-leading intelligent data services.
We offer broadest range of protection of data types and location to our customers present over spectrum of industries such as AU Small Finance Bank in BFSI, Orchid Pharma in healthcare, Sify in technology sector and Apollo Tyres in manufacturing sector.
Global trends are reflecting BFSI as the highest adopter of SaaS, followed by retail, healthcare and education. Moreover, the SMEs driven by cyber-security threats and benefits of SaaS for its scalability, simplicity and consumption models like pay as you use are growing SaaS adopters.
What is the market trend from a BCP perspective as people are scattered?
As we look back at 2020, we were faced with a new normal, a new remote workforce, and new challenges. While the world adapted to the global COVID-19 pandemic, we saw organizations rushed to move applications and workloads to the cloud. Cyberattacks have increasingly become sophisticated and government regulators are expecting data governance in accordance with data privacy regulations.
From a BCP perspective, we will see investment on data analytics solutions for data audit and compliance with data privacy regulations as companies strengthen their BCP processes from the four walls of their data centers and now on the cloud.
No security system is perfect, IT has to contend with a daily mutli-generational data sprawl as data and workloads are generated and moved from on-prem, to the cloud and back again across the company. We expect to see organizations accelerating to put in place business continuity processes and data recovery solutions not just from malicious cyberattacks, but also from natural disasters (like this pandemic) as well.
Technologies like Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will continue to be widely adopted into intelligent data management solutions as part of a robust BCP as these digital technologies allows data to be analysed, interpreted, protected and recovered quickly and efficiently, no matter where your data lies.
What is your assessment of the channel market growth in 2021?
The Channel is a significant layer to Commvault’s go-to-market strategy. We are a partner-led- organisation and we co-sell with our channel partners. The Channel market growth certainly has a positive outlook and the same will continue post pandemic as more organisations are embracing digitalisation at a faster pace.
The data management channel which includes the fast growing SaaS and BaaS partners have helped enterprises continue their business and survive through the global lockdown. Moreover, other factors such as accelerated digitalisation , growth of cloud adoption, and increased remote working will create a huge demand for IT services and SaaS/BaaS remains strong and the channel market will benefit out of this.
What is your plan for the channel partners in terms of their business continuity and growth?
We are passionate about the success of our Channel partners as their success directly translates into our own success. This year our plan of business continuity & growth for our partners centers on a unique 3P concept that does wonders in ensuring partners’ needs are met.
- Partner Profitability – This matters most in any business and Commvault is no exception, we have exciting award-winning, profitable and predictable programs off the starting block for our partners.
- Pipeline – This is the lifeline of any business, if worked correctly with maniacal focus, it will ensure consistency & success for partners now and for the future as well.
- Performance – We have a hawkeyed focus on growth to increase top-line and market share, which are crucial to build repeatable and visible success.
What kind of financial support are you enabling for your partner network in India as project payments are getting delayed?
We are working closely with our distributors to ensure we extend adequate financial support via credit line and credit payment extension for partners in need.
Any strategic change are you making to the partner programme for 2021?
In 2021, there are new training modules that are included under the program such as the Commvault Professional certification; MSP Solutions Training; MSP Operations Staff Training and Core Enablement for MSP, to name a few.
Partners have been given the choice of ‘pay-as-you-go’ options for software licensing or more long-term purchases with higher discounts. These are the latest iteration of the Partner Advantage Program as we are taking it to the next level by investing in new GTM [go-to-market] and technical enablement initiatives designed to further energise our partners, specifically MSPs and aggregators.
Any vertical-specific strategy are you adopting as many of the sectors are not performing well?
Commvault’s industry-leading Intelligent Data Services platform empowers professionals to store, protect, optimise, and use their data, wherever it lives and no matter which industry you are in.
Our solutions unify the management of all Intelligent Data Service capabilities in one place, providing ease-of-use and a single-pane of glass to simplify data management and improve operational efficiency.
With this radically simple and scalable solution, our key strategy is to optimize our go-to-market motion to land new deals and expand our footprint with existing customers in BFSI, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing. Healthcare and Education are areas where we see high adoption of SaaS for landing new deals.
What kind of channel activities are you looking at rolling out into the market to spread your core messages?
Commvault’s industry-leading Intelligent Data Services platform empowers professionals to store, protect, optimise, and use their data, wherever it lives. As organisations are digitally transforming and adopting the cloud, multi-generational data sprawl threatens the fundamental integrity of their businesses.
We are in the best position to solve this problem with intelligent data services delivering the ultimate in simplicity and flexibility to customers; and is available as a software subscription; integrated appliance; partner-managed, and software-as-a-service—a critical differentiator in the market.
To align our partners to the above messages, and to ensure a healthy and profitable channel, there is our award winning Partner Advantage program which makes it easier for partners to source and complete new transactions.
Apart from this we are constantly:
- Investing in channel partners in each geography and in their enablement to drive incremental revenue participation
- Collaborating with our service provider on new customer acquisition and expanding into existing ones, especially with large accounts.
- Forging stronger Alliance partnership like HPe, Hitachi & Netapp to penetrate new accounts
