Cloud data management vendor Commvault is looking to get ahead of the competition using its strategic partners and taking advantage of market uncertainty.
This week, the firm held its SHIFT event at BAFTA in London’s West End. While it wasn’t a night of the stars like last weekend’s BAFTA film awards, Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Vantara, Pure Storage, and a number of others, turned up to nominate Commvault as the best actor in the market when it comes to leading edge data solutions.
Addressing a packed audience, and careful not to stand in front of the ‘F’ in front of the giant SHIFT sign on stage, Richard Gadd (pictured), senior vice president of EMEA at Commvault, said: “We are making the biggest shift in our 27-year history, moving towards fully serving the hybrid enterprise and addressing the emerging threats.
“Ransomware is driven by confusion and chaos, and cost business a total of $30 billion globally in 2023. And, according to the World Economic Forum, only climate change and natural disasters pose a bigger threat than ransomware.
“But the status quo [in the data protection industry] is not going to cut it when tackling this threat. However, our 100,000 customers and vast array of partners place us in a unique position to tackle all the threats.”
Four years ago, Commvault launched its Metallic SaaS cloud data management and protection product, and Gadd says this now has 4,000 customers, generating $130m in annual recurring revenue.
That’s not massive relative to the vendor’s total customer base, but Metallic signalled that Commvault was properly moving to cloud delivery, and away from its monolithic data appliances and reliance on complicated on-premise licenses.
IT Europa attended the vendor’s first Commvault GO customer and partner conferences in Orlando and Washington DC a few years before the launch of Metallic, and talking to the company’s previous leadership at these events about cloud migration plans was a frustrating experience - there were no publicly available cloud product roadmaps. And this was at a time when newer kids on the block like Veeam, Cohesity, Rubrik, and even SMB player Acronis, were already starting to take business away from Commvault through the cloud.
It was like Commvault, along with its arch rival in the enterprise space, Veritas, were resigned to their fate – being drowned in an expanding sea of smaller and nimbler data management players.
Metallic was not launched in a big bang by any means. After making a commercial appearance in the US soon after the marketing launch there – which IT Europa also attended as part of an IT Press Tour roadshow – the roll-out of Metallic was limited to only a few European countries to begin with.
Commvault was clearly still planning and finalising its cloud delivery infrastructure and channel requirements to get the product properly into the market. But now it is adding new features to it.
Gadd maintains that ‘Commvault Cloud Powered by Metallic AI’ is a “cost that makes sense” and which offers the “industry’s lowest total cost of ownership”.
IT Europa sat down with Commvault leadership to find out more about the channel strategy, and this will follow...
