Competition in data backup and management addressed at conference
The increasingly crowded data backup and data management market may go the same way as the flash storage market, with incumbent players seeing off the upstarts, so Commvault hopes.
In the flash storage sector, the likes of NetApp for instance, was, by its own admission slow to respond to the rapid demand for flash storage solutions, as a cheaper alternative to the all-singing and all-dancing traditional disk configurations it and other big players were used to selling. As a result there was a slew of new flash storage companies being launched to take important slices of the market, with venture capital rushing in to benefit from the opportunities.
However, NetApp and other storage big players like HPE and Dell EMC soon caught up by launching a slew of their own flash products, and as a result the established storage pecking has been resumed.
On the backup and data management market situation, Commvault global channels and alliances chief Ralph Nimergood addressed the new challengers at this week's annual Commvault GO partner and customer conference in Washington DC.
He told IT Europa: "The job of putting the importance of data backup and elements of data management into the heads of potential new market customers has largely been done well by new players like Veeam, Cohesity, Rubrik and others, but it's now time for them to move over.
"We have major alliances with Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon Web Services and now Google, and can address all the cloud and as-a-service subscription demands of our customers and partners."
Commvault's move towards offering more of its services via the cloud has not been painless, but that is what it had to do as a leader in the market, along with the likes of Dell EMC and IBM. A poor second quarter just reported was mainly put down to some "sales team issues" in the US, but the share price was affected all the same, and it took some gloss off Commvault's ongoing business transformation.
That said, the analogy with what has happened in the flash market with the potential of what may happen in the data management market is backed by Commvault chief operations officer Al Bunte. He says: "Many of those new flash players are now struggling and may disappear all together. I'm sure the same will happen with many of the 'challengers' in our market. Maybe not as quickly as we would like, but pretty inevitable all the same, they cannot compete with a full modular product suite like ours."