Commvault Makes Good on Channel Promise

Commvault today made good on a promise to realign its sales efforts around channel partners by first consolidating over 20 offerings into four core product groupings in addition to revamping major aspects of its channel program that among other things includes a new iteration of the company’s partner portal.

New additions to the channel program include a Partner Success Desk, an on-demand service center for partners that provides 24-hour assistance with every step of the sales process, and a Partner Demand Center, which gives partners access to a Commvault marketing concierge team to help activate and execute marketing campaigns.

Commvault also revealed it had enhanced the Commvault Quote Center to make it easier for partners to generate and provide product quotes in a matter of minutes, dramatically reducing the time it takes for sellers to create proposals and expanding the Business Development Funds made available to partners.

Those changes come on the heels of a new team channel executives at Commvault taking the channel reins at Commvault, says Ralph Nimergood, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at Commvault.

Among the first things that new team concluded was that existing Commvault product portfolio was too complicated, says Nimergood. That complexity resulted in too much time being taken to first craft solutions and all too often having to wait for special pricing requests to be determined.

“Customers and partner don’t want to have to wait,” says Nimergood.

Now Commvault offers a Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery offering that spans most application use cases. That offering is complemented by a higher end hyper-scale offering as well as orchestration and governance applications that can be layered on top of the Commvault platforms.

The goal, says Nimergood, is to create a level of “experiential bias” within the Commvault partner base to make it less attractive to consider selling rival products.

Most partners today generate most of their profits from services. In most cases, products are a means to deliver those services. Of course, partners can bill for services until the products are delivered, which means in many instances the vendor that provides the path of least resistance for delivering those services is going to be the most preferred every time.