Hyper-converged backup in Commvault’s future
Commvault is getting into the hyper-converged backup game.
Commvault CEO Bob Hammer outlined the vendor’s product plans for the coming months Wednesday, May 3 during its quarterly earnings call. He said hyper-converged reference architectures for secondary storage are in the company’s plans, along with an enhanced platform for the cloud, new service offerings for endpoints and Commvault managed services. The company also plans to enhance the Commvault Data Platform with business analytics.
Hammer didn’t give enough specifics to tell if the hyper-converged backup products will be similar to converged platforms such as Rubrik and Cohesity. He will leave the details to the actual product launch. But he did lay out Commvault’s strategy.
“We are launching this quarter our move into secondary storage with a whole series of leading-edge hyper-converged solutions,” Hammer said. “And right on the back of that are a series of new standalone solutions, and right on the back of that is analytics.”
Hammer said Commvault’s hyper-converged backup reference architectures will handle snapshots, replication, archiving and copy data management. In addition, he said, scale-out hyper-converged backup configurations will be available this fall. The company will also expand with managed services for backup, archive and endpoint offerings.
“There is a massive trend in the industry to move away from legacy infrastructure to more commodity cloud-like infrastructures,” he said. “The key commoditized hardware components will be managed by software…Our approach to hyper-converged storage is unique, since it combines Commvault Platform’s comprehensive index knowledge of the data with the management of the backend storage.”
Commvault is building business analytics into its data management platform by adding search capabilities that can be fed into analytics engines.
“It also includes embedding machine learning and other artificial intelligence capabilities into our platform,” Hammer said.
Continued growth depends on more large deals
Commvault reported total revenue of $172.9 million last quarter, an increase of 8% year-over-year and a sequential increase of 4%. Commvault posted $650.5 million in total revenues for the full fiscal year, an increase of 9% compared to fiscal 2016.
Software revenue of $84.7 million in the quarter was an increase of 15% year-over-year and a 10% sequential increase. Services accounted for $88.2 million for fiscal 2017, an increase of 2% year-over-year and a flat sequential increase.
Total software revenue for the full fiscal year was $296 million, an increase of 15% compared to fiscal 2016. Services revenue for the full fiscal year was $354 million, which was an increase of 5% compared to 2016.
Commvault reported a net income of $3.2 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017, and a net income of $500,000 for the full fiscal year. Hammer said the objective for this year is to further improve licensing revenue through the enhanced product portfolio “focused on market-leading solutions for customers dealing with big three trends in the market.”
Those three market trends include the cloud, IT infrastructure modernization and business analytics. Commvault has been working on digging itself out of a sales slump that began in 2014. In a previous earnings call, Hammer said the company still faces some critical challenges and continued growth depends on its ability to win more large deals. A lot of its success will turn on releases of new Commvault products.