The new channel chief for Commvault plans to ask partners some difficult questions about their real data protection and management capabilities. As part of an ongoing restructuring of the company, Commvault is looking to bring on new partners capable of selling more than just backup and recovery appliances.
Commvault has an extensive partner base, says, Scott Strubel, vice president of worldwide channels, who recently joined Commvault after serving as a channel leader at NetApp. But when it comes to selling more advanced data management offerings, such as the Commvault Data Platform, the company has a lot of work to do when it comes to the level of pre and post-sales support that is being made available to channel partners, says Strubel.
Strubel says Commvault is committing to investing more in sales enablement tools and making it simpler to register deals and conclude transactions. Collectively, those efforts should increase the “experiential bias” of partners in a way that makes it more likely they will recommend Commvault products, he adds. The goal is to increase both profitability and overall transaction volume while enabling more predictability and consistency, says Strubel.
But in return for making those investments, Commvault is looking for partners willing to not only invest in acquiring the skills required to sell advanced data management platforms but also what level of professional services capabilities and amount of vertical industry expertise they have.
“We’ll be asking some hard questions,” says Strubel.
Commvault is in the middle of a major transition of its own. Long-time CEO Bob Hammer is stepping down once a new CEO can be found, although he will continue as chairman. Commvault also laid off four percent of its staff. Those decisions came just one month after activist investor Elliott Management disclosed its stake in Commvault and published a letter calling for fundamental changes.
In the fourth quarter, which ended March 31, Commvault generated revenues of $184.9 million — an increase of 11% year over year. Full fiscal year revenue of $699.4 million increased eight percent year over year. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, Commvault reported a net loss of $1.7 million. For the full fiscal year, the company reported a net loss of $61.9 million. At the same time, Commvault notes that over 30 customers have increased their investments in Commvault products in the last fiscal year.
Commvault earlier this year named Owen Taraniuk as its new head of worldwide partnerships and market development and then appointed Andy Vandeveld to be vice president of worldwide alliances. Strubel assumes responsibilities previously held by Ralph Nimergood, Commvault’s vice president of indirect strategy for channel sales and chief of staff within the worldwide partnerships and market development group. Nimergood has remained with the company. Both Strubel and Nimergood report to Taraniuk.
Over the last several months Commvault has signed technology alliances with Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), INFINIDAT, Google, and Microsoft. Those alliances have provided Commvault with access to new partners that previously may not have focused on data protection and data management. The expectation is that many of those partners will start to attach Commvault products and services to the solutions they already sell. Of course, many of those partners may have already agreed to resell rival offerings. But at the very least, Commvault will get a hearing from more partners.
In the meantime, channel partners should be heartened by the fact that there is more data being managed than ever before. That data not only needs to be protected and secured, it also needs to be optimally placed near applications that are now more distributed than ever in the age of the cloud. In fact, the opportunity to provide the services required to manage all that data on behalf of customers has never been greater.
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