As part of an ongoing effort to make more resources available to partners, Commvault has appointed Carmen Sorice III to the new position of vice president of worldwide route services.
Prior to joining Commvault, Sorice founded Qlarity LLC; a professional services firm focused on helping partners and enterprises navigate digital transformation. Previously, Sorice worked at AT&T, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel Lucent, and SunGard Availability Services.
The overall goal to create a partner development team within Commvault that is specifically tasked with making sure new and existing Commvault partners will succeed at scale, says Sorice.
Sorice goes as far as to contend the demise of traditional partner program is at hand as vendors such as Commvault move to more actively engage with partners at a time when the product landscape has never been more complex.
“It used to be partners only needed to be engaged twice a year to learn about a vendor’s product,” says Sorice. “The rate of change has been accelerated, and partners need to stay up to speed.”
Most products now come in multiple configurations that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Each use case requires more interaction between partners and vendors to create a proof of concept that best provides the optimal customer experience, says Sorice. At the same time, Sorice says Commvault is investing resources in enabling partners to develop data management expertise that goes well beyond data protection in a way that aligns closely with the company’s overall strategy. Commvault is especially interested in recruiting partners that have cloud integration, and automation expertise as data protection continues to become driven by “self-driving backup” processes, adds Sorice.
To facilitate that transition Sorice says Commvault has been making investments in the realm of business intelligence to identify better sales opportunities that are nurtured by Commvault before being shared with a partner. Commvault isn’t necessarily evaluating its channel strategy based on the number of partners it has, but rather the total number of sellers that are active across its channel.
In general, Sorice says Commvault is looking to add a modest number of partners capable of driving sales into new customer accounts to drive top-line revenue growth. Sales, in general, is now more relationship driven across the channel ecosystem, adds Sorice.
It may take Commvault a little while to realize all its ambitions for the channel. But given the level of investments being made it’s clear that should Commvault fail to achieve its overall goals it won’t be for want of effort in the channel.
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