Fresh image and roadmap “breathe new life” into Commvault

Commvault has promised partners a greater focus on innovation moving forward as it looks to enter a new chapter under CEO Sanjay Mirchandani.

The data protection, backup and recovery vendor unveiled a new look and strategy this week at its Partner Xchange event at Commvault GO 2019 in Denver, Colorado, where alongside a commitment to innovate it vowed to be simpler for partners to work with.

Mirchandani, who replaced 20-year veteran Bob Hammer as chief executive in February, is heading up the changes. He has been charged with transforming the company after a series of initiatives were introduced last year to boost the fortunes of the company.

An early example of the new direction is Commvault’s first SaaS offering, Metallic, announced that the event. Targeted at firms of 500-2500 employees and available through partners – although initially in the US only – Metallic offers customers core, Office 365 and endpoint backup & recovery, which they can can purchase on an annual or monthly subscription basis.

“We focused on building a true, next-generation SaaS experience,” said Mirchandani.

Another indicator of Commvault’s new philosophy is that Metallic is a spin-off venture within the company. “We’re really innovating from the inside out,” said the CEO. “We created a company inside the company, funded it, ran it, built it like a start-up.”

Elsewhere, Mirchandani pointed to the acquisition of software-defined storage start-up Hedvig last month, which the firm says, “will enable Commvault to realise the unification of storage and data management.”

Carmen Sorice, got-to-market chief of staff, said the changes were promoted by partners, who said: “You’ve had a stable portfolio for a long time, but what are you going to do about innovation?” listing multi-cloud, cloud native apps, containerisation and ransomware as potential game-changers for the backup and recovery market.

However, it is not just the changes to the vendor’s roadmap that are evident to partners – the entire company has undertaken a rapid makeover over in recent months.

CMO Chris Powell told partners the re-brand was Commvault trying to “break out from the crowd” of competitors like Druva, Rubrik, Veeam and Cohesity. “What we found, as we’re looking at this overall market, is we were stuck like many of organisations, in a sea of sameness. If you look at the messages, if you look at the colour schemes, if you look at everything, you’re just stuck in a sea of same.”

As a result, Powell announced not only the re-branding, but changes to Commvault’s website to drive greater demand, alongside content syndication and other joint campaigns with partners.

The changes have been welcomed by partners in attendance at the event. Andrew Cochrane, solutions architect at Softcat, said that Mirchandani’s vision for the company is becoming clearer to partners.

“I think it’s reinvigorating a brand that was quite stale, and maybe a bit complacent,” he told Microscope. “[Mirchandani] has a vision where he sees it going, which I think is a good one, with the SaaS play.

“It’s definitely given the brand a lot more life; it seems a lot more focused than what it was before. It’s almost given them another lease of life – not that they were dead, but they were a bit long in the tooth maybe.”