Comms Business talks to Owen Taraniuk, Head of Worldwide Partnerships and Market Development at US Cloud & Data Management firm Commvault about their go to market strategy and why this is shifting towards the partner model.
Commvault has a history steeped in the best US tradition. The business was formed in 1988 as a development group within Bell Labs, and later designated as a strategic business unit of AT&T Network Systems (later Lucent). It became an independent company in 1996. Today Commvault is a $700m operation headquartered in New Jersey and employs around 2500 staff.
In essence, Commvault software is an enterprise-level data platform that contains modules to back up, restore, archive, replicate, and search data. It is built from the ground-up on a single platform and unified code base.
Comms Business Magazine (CBM): How is Commvault software deployed for users; cloud, on-premise or a hybrid model?
Owen Taraniuk (OT): All three models are available – the choice is down to the user.
How you manage data today is becoming more complex and how you leverage its value and how you protect the data is important. Unprecedented data growth, multi-cloud complexity, fragmented backup silos, sprawling applications, regulatory compliance, and the need for analytics continue to pressure companies.
Commvault has had a long and successful partner network, 90% of our business is partner derived and we have in place world class programs to support them. Looking at the landscape today and the explosive growth in data we need to double-down on those partnerships.
Last October we announced a partnership with Cisco combining Commvault HyperScale Software with Cisco’s Unified Computing System that provides enterprises a single, integrated solution that delivers infrastructure simplicity, elasticity, resiliency, flexibility and scale for managing secondary data, while replacing legacy back-up tools with a modern cloud-enabled data management solution.
CBM. You say your role is to drive growth, so how will you achieve this?
OT: We are putting more horsepower in our channel offerings which means making sure our partner experience leads us to become vendor of choice, easy to use and easy to work with.
Commvault has made a number of strategic hires this year to achieve this goal. I was appointed to my present role in January, having spent three years as Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan and most recently we appointed Scott Strubel as vice president of worldwide channels, responsible for Commvault’s global ecosystem of resellers and distributors.
In this role, he will focus on delivering innovative programs that help channel partners differentiate our solutions in the market and deliver value to their customers, while helping us drive growth across the company's solution portfolio.
Commvault’s fundamental path to growth is through its partnerships and the company is committed to increasing its partner focus by deploying more resources at the partner level and simplifying packaging, pricing and licensing to make it easier for partners to deliver value to their customers.
CBM: How does Commvault, as a US based organisation, view our new, European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
OT: As I mentioned, the market growing – there is growth in data in every area with people trying to leverage cloud, legacy and compliance issues. It is a cocktail of demand and challenges. Data needs to be always available so how do you manage it? How do you move it around? We are agnostic to where data is housed.
Commvault is very positive about the GDPR. By its very nature, the GDPR could be viewed as being disruptive and complex for companies but this only opens consulting and service opportunities for our partners.
The current US view of GDPR is that there is a lot of learning to be done regarding the framework and distribution of data. For some there is alarm at the prospect of an impact or effect but it’s a road map for a lot of people where Commvault and our partners will be a natural combination to turn to for answers and solutions.