Data Management, Analytics & AI

It’s hard to believe that almost exactly a year ago, on October 14, 2019, Commvault launched Metallic, which is now an award-winning solution. As a product guy, I know from experience how difficult but rewarding it is to get an award at VMworld for your solution. A one-year old solution with a best in show is very impressive. Well done Metallic team! More importantly: well executed!

The stakes are high in this vendor space with intense competition (including in the SaaS backup/DR segment) as end-users accelerate their digital transformation and rely on data even more than before. Not to mention the ransomware attacks intensification. The present and future of BC/DR are “cloudy” and, based on our research, we expect to see organizations continuing to adopt data protection as a service moving forward, and an evolution toward intelligent data management and data reuse. These are very favorable trends.

Let’s look at the execution side of the equation: the addition of Manoj Nair a few months ago as GM built on the original momentum culminating in the recent partnership announcement with Azure, based on a long-standing relationship between Commvault and Microsoft. This is where strategy meets execution, with a meaningful partnership based on years of “dancing” together. It’s something that I firmly believe will in time differentiate this offering from others where everyone dances with everyone.

Let me summarize some highlights of one quick year. Metallic launched October 14^th 2019. Since then:

• Strategic MSFT Partnership announced.
• Azure Marketplace launch (Office 365).
• Feature expansion: Hyper V Support.
• Manoj Nair becomes GM.
• Metallic offers free endpoint offer to help with the shift to a remote workforce.
• CAD Expansion.
• Metallic partners with Zones (Office 365 Backup and Recovery).
• Feature expansion: Azure Blob & File Support.
• Azure Marketplace Launch (Endpoint).
• New eDiscovery and GDPR compliance features + support for more Microsoft workloads.
• Awards: SaaS Awards finalist; IT World Awards Winner.
• ANZ Expansion.
• Feature expansion: Commvault Command Center Integration.
• Awards: Gold Stevies Winner.

I may have missed some milestones, but you get the idea.

I wrote in other blogs how Commvault has been transforming at a rapid pace, with the acquisition of Hedvig being a move that positioned Commvault ahead of the race in the containers space, many features additions, and of course Metallic, which was designed to be a cloud solution from inception. Both the Hedvig and Metallic moves were what I call “pragmatically visionary.” They were big strategic and market differentiating decisions focused on an informed belief of future market directions (containers, SaaS), and (of course!) they could also be monetized reasonably quickly with the right level of execution and investment. Which takes us to today.

The Metallic offering is now at what seems like a very desirable inflection point and prime for accelerated growth. It’s making Commvault as a whole more competitive and will clearly get in the way of newer SaaS-focused vendors. One year is a long time in the SaaS space. Let’s take a look at where Metallic is one year from now. In the meantime: Happy Birthday!

Kaseya is hosting its Connect IT 2020 conference online this year, as could be expected, and just unveiled a number of new capabilities and integrations following an acquisition announcement yesterday of email security and phishing defense platform Graphus. 

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Execution.  On many fronts.

This is really what came to mind in the first few minutes of the Commvault FutureReady online event yesterday (7/21).

First, the event itself was excellent: length, content, delivery, use of customers, and it included primarily live sessions from what I could tell. The platform worked without a hitch. To net it out: as a participant, one benefited from both engaging content, and active engagement through the ability to interact with the speakers. Great job! Great execution.

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I wrote some months ago that under Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault was not just changing, it had already changed. Fast forward a few months and we now find ourselves in a totally different world. But one thing that hasn’t changed and stands out is the continued execution and focus of the Commvault team, even through these confusing times.

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The recent research ESG conducted on the impact of COVID-19 on knowledge workers and on IT spending intentions revealed a few interesting findings that directly affect data protection. Backup and recovery is hot!  While some organizations are cutting their IT budgets, not every one is and some specific technologies are actually doing better than others. Among the top 3 technologies least likely to be reduced: cybersecurity, remote/telework solutions…and data protection! 26% of our IT executive respondents said their data protection budget is actually going increase, and 54% will keep it steady. Cloud technologies and services fare very well across the board as one could have guessed in the current climate.  

End-users also reported suffering from an intensification of cyber-attacks, making the remediation strategies (backup and recovery) even more relevant.  

For end-users, this means that more than ever you should inspect your current backup and recovery infrastructure, its SLAs, and test its capabilities. Many new options for remote management now exist, and with many workloads migrating to the cloud, it may be time to revisit how you are protecting those data assets. 

What this means for vendors of backup and recovery solutions, especially cloud-focused offerings, is that it’s a great time to double down on your marketing efforts and investments. People are listening. They want to spend to more, and need to modernize in many cases. 

Never a dull moment in this market! 

VeeamON used to have 2000 attendees. That was in the “old” world from a few months ago. The “new normal” has made the company pivot its popular event to digital, as is happening around the industry, with more or less success and execution prowess. 

Veeam nailed it.

One interesting thing happened: it “democratized” the event, making it available to 20 times more people than the physical event could. So out of a “bad” thing, a good thing happened. Veeam will also hold localized versions of this in various parts of the world in the next few weeks, like Europe. However, it was pretty clear that many did not want to wait and joined the event despite the time difference. 

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