Commvault’s legacy may be as a backup and recovery vendor, but that important but crowded space is not, alone, where it sees its present or future. Rather, Garth Scully, area vice president for Canada at Commvault, is focusing not only on its current status as a broader data management company, but on its future, on a data management and insights company.

For the former Cisco exec who’s been with Commvault a year and a half, getting that message across, and realizing the opportunity it represents, is his major mission.

“My most frequent conversations with senior executives is to help them understand that we’re a data management company – that we work with companies in the cloud, in the hyper-converged space, in endpoint protection, in the ransomware space,” Scully said, before adding, “and we do backup and archive.”

The company, which does all of its business through and with partners, is bringing to Canada a consultation service offering that it’s been offering int he U.S. for some time, targeting the C-suite’s interest in the broader digital transformation conversation as a way to explore opportunities beyond its traditional core of backup and archiving. Dubbed Business Transformational Services, the service is offered free to customers, and aims to “help them build an architecture to take their data and use it as a competitive advantage,” Scully said, in a vendor-agnostic discussion.

“We go out and we don’t talk about Commvault. We look for the right vendors to bring in around our offerings — the right cloud vendor, the right storage products, and look at how we can drive the business outcomes that are important to them,” he said.

The BTS engagement has been offered in the U.S. for about eight months now, and Scully said the company is already seeing results from its efforts. The move to work with customers on this has moved the company away from a “straight product sale” engagement, is driving deal sizes up both for Commvault and for partners, and is introducing new opportunities for partners as Commvault, partner, and customer all work together to identify business transformation priorities and the appropriate solutions to meet those requirements.

“It really helps show customers that we’re not just moving data around, but we’re data experts,” said David Bedjanic, Commvault’s director of channels sales for Canada and the Eastern U.S. “We’ll help you secure it and use it as an asset. That’s what the platform is all about.”

The charge to identify customers that will be a good fit is being led by the company’s internal sales team in Canada, which has been charged with doing at least one BTS engagement per quarter. As a result, Scully said the company expects to have upwards of 50 done by the end of the company’s fiscal year in March. Target customers aren’t determined as much by size of customer as by the amount and complexity of the data they generate within the organization, and the potential to drive more business insights out of that data.

“You could have a 10-person organization that’s very data-centric, and they’d be a great fit for BTS,” Scully said.

While the engagement may be led by Commvault’s own sales team, partners are always involved in the process, Bedjanic said.

“They’ve been working with the customer for a number years, in many cases, and they know them well,” Bedjanic said. “They deserve a seat at the table, and they have their own services they can offer to build out the solution and meet customers’ desired outcomes.”

A team consisting of representatives form Commvault’s sales team, the BTS team, partners and the customer involved work together to identify priorities for data-centric goals for the customer involved. A path is then drawn up to meet those sought outcomes, and identify return on investment for any further investments in equipment and services — from Commvault or otherwise — to meet those goals.

Scully said the company has added “some high level consultative” people to facilitate BTS. Today, those people are based in the U.S., but support BTS engagements throughout the Americas. As the idea takes off, Scully said he’d ultimately like to have a specific Canadian team in place to run BTS engagements.

And Scully does expect the movement to grow, because done right, it’s an effort that’s a win for all involved.

“It’s driving larger opportunity, it’s driving better solutions, it’s driving better visibility for our partners. We’re talking to more senior-level people, and it helps change the perception of what we are,” Scully said.

In part two of ChannelBuzz’s conversation with Commvault Canada, we’ll touch on the vendor’s efforts to work with more partners of its key technology alliance partners, its message for “sell-to” partners like MSPs, and its new usage-based subscription pricing model option.