Kathy Gibson is at Techscape 2022 – Covid-19 wasn’t the only challenge we lived through in 2021: supply chain issues, chip shortages, an upsurge in cybercrime, and the July riots all had a major impact on South African companies and the way they work.
Kate Mollett, regional director: Africa at Commvault, points out that events have taught us just how vulnerable data is.
“Data needs to be readily available from anywhere, at any time – and this has never been more relevant,” she says.
“Workloads are widely different, and data needs to be protected while companies leverage it to release value.
“Wherever the data resides – whether it is on-premise, in the cloud or SaaS – we need to make sure we are managing and protecting it in a very efficient way.”
Mollett points out that Commvault employs 2 400 people around the world, with 100 000 customers and 11 exabytes of data under management, and 895 active patents.
Gerhard Fourie, channel lead at Commvault Africa, adds that the company has more than 300 customers in Africa and 200 petabytes of data under management.
The vendor goes to market through more than 300 resellers, 12 Focus Partners, five OEM Strategic Partners, nine Service Advantage Partners and 275 technical certifications overall. In addition, there are more than seven backup as a service offerings available using Commvault.
Some of the risks around data protection that customers face including being unprepared, not having a usable backup, high costs, emerging threats and general uncertainty in the market.
Customers are looking for ease of use, reliable copies, cost-optimised data mobility, proactive threat management and verifiable recoverability.
The industry is rapidly changing, and there are four growth areas the indicate opportunities for partners,
A massive 84% of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy; containers are going to be big, with more than 75% of workloads set to be based on containers this year; by 2024 50% of global storage capacity will be deployed as software-defined storage; and modernising data protection will grow as 40% of companies that bought backup applications in 2018 will replace them this year.
The market is changing, the way we do business is changing. But it is not getting smaller; it is getting bigger,” Fourie says.
And the total addressable intelligent data management market that Commvault covers is worth a massive $20-billion.
The company goes to market through partners, Fourie adds.
Key elements of a winning partnership creating more relevant for resellers include an innovative product portfolio, an empowered partner ecosystem, and predictable profitability.
He says that Commvault’s delivers solid business value with complete data protection services that offer a comprehensive solution that is cloud-native and allows for flexible SLAs (service level agreements).
The solutions are delivered on a single Intelligent Data Management Platform and is available via partners. The solution can be provided as customer-owned and managed software, as a turnkey integrated hardware and software integrated appliance, as a pay-as-you grow as-a-service solution; and as a partner managed service.
The Commvault portfolio includes data management and protection, data security, data compliance and governance, data transformation, and data insights. It is provided as software, on storage, or via the Metallic software as a service (SaaS) platform.
An empowered partner ecosystem include data centre/infrastructure partners, technology and application partners, global system integrators, managed service providers and cloud integrators.
Commvault partners gain benefits from the program, while Commvault actively works with them on sales alignment and collaboration, and partner-led services open up new revenue opportunities for resellers.