Commvault looks to extend MSP ecosystem

Commvault is continuing to focus on delivering its technology as a service and reaching out to more managed service providers (MSPs).

The vendor recently held its Connections event and used it to usher in the next wave of partners that had followed its first global design partner, SoftwareONE, in joining the Metallic MSP ecosystem.

“The global launch was SoftwareONE but now, some months later, we are busy building out the next set of relationships,” said Jamie Farrelly, vice-president, EMEA channels and alliances at Commvault.

“Commvault is massively focused, one on the channel and two on this transformation from perpetual selling to SaaS [software as a service]. We’ve got a model with SaaS technology which is market-leading. We’ve now got a portal which allows it to be multi-tenancy and API integrated, so that you can get all kinds of MSPs, from the largest to the smallest, connecting to the Metallic portal, in order to take our service to market and add more value to customers and obviously make more profits for themselves.”

Farrelly said the technology had been developed to support backup and storage needs across a range of scenarios, including Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, Kubernetes and containers. Once that had been done, it was important to put it into the hands of the channel to get it in front of customers.

“It’s our vision to help our customers ultimately, but also our partners, consume in the way that they want to consume,” he added. “That’s best for them, whether that be a capex model, opex model or anywhere in between. So, it was always part of the plan to be as-a-service and as an MSP delivery.”

Farrelly said that so far, Commvault had been working with some large MSPs, but the strategy would see it expand the number of specialists that it worked with as it looked to expand the variety of managed service players that were part of the programme.

He added that Commvault was just at the start of the process of driving MSP business and it had invested in a team earlier this year to support those ambitions, and expected the number of relationships to grow as it started to look ahead into 2022.

“We are growing dramatically in MSP,” he said. “We see that there are a lot of MSPs that are building a coverage workload model. They see things like backup and security, and specifically ransomware, [as key areas] that in the cloud are hugely important. Backup, for me, is a C-level conversation.”

Commvault used Connections to usher in Metallic Security IQ, a security dashboard that provides insights into threats, as it added more depth on that front.

Manoj Nair, general manager, Metallic, said: “Organisations are demanding that their IT teams not only manage, protect and govern data, but that they also deliver data security insights that help the organisation’s overall security posture and recovery readiness. As a result, IT operations teams are being asked to provide more insights to security operations teams at an urgent pace.”