For the first time, Commvault solutions specific to Cisco will be part of Cisco’s Global Price List, making it easier for the two companies’ mutual resellers to deliver joint solutions.
Ralph Nimergood, VP, Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Commvault
Enterprise data protection vendor Commvault has joined Cisco’s Solutions Plus program. As a result, Commvault data platform solutions specific to Cisco will be part of Cisco’s Global Price List, making Cisco and its partners direct Commvault resellers.
“This is a significant extension of our Cisco alliance, which will further accelerate our momentum with Cisco,” said Ralph Nimergood, VP, Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Commvault. “Cisco will resell a portion of our Commvault software within their price book.”
While Cisco and Commvault have been close partners for years, this is the first time that the relationship has taken a reseller angle, and Nimergood said that this reflects the evolution of the data centre market – rather than sales and marketing strategy from Cisco and Commvault.
“The driving force behind this foray into reselling was not us figuring out how to sell more Commvault products or Cisco trying to figure out how to augment their line,” he stated. “It is a natural extension of the data centre market. You have had an explosion in the amount of secondary storage there, which isn’t used in production. It’s in analytics, compliance, disaster recovery, test/dev. Customers have been looking for a way to manage that in a best-of-breed stack, and that is what we have been doing at scale with Cisco in our joint engineering efforts. Stacks matter. Flexibility and choice matter. As many clients are modernizing their data centre infrastructures, this will make it easier for them to buy an integrated stack that’s been fully tested around data protection workloads.”
It will also make it much easier for Cisco and its resellers who also work with Commvault to sell.
“We have many strong overlapping resellers with Cisco, for whom Commvault is an important ingredient in their practice,” Nimergood noted. “The beauty of adding the resell component – whether on FlexPod or FlashStack or Cisco scale-out boxes, is that it can provide a seamless buying experience for the reseller as well. Data protection as a gateway to the cloud has become a growth driver for the Cisco data centre team, and this makes us better able to attack specific workloads. We’ve been going to market together and winning together, with flexibility and choice.”
Nimergood indicated that while Cisco has frequently put other vendor partners on their Price List, this hasn’t been common at all in the data centre.
“Cisco historically has put many collaboration ISV partners in their price book, but it has been in other parts of the business, like telephony and collaboration,” he said. “There are a lot of smaller ISVs in these areas, and they did that so that it wasn’t necessary to order a lot of little suppliers separately. On the data centre side, they have been slower to do this, and bringing data centre-oriented partners onto the Price List is new to them.”
Four Cisco-focused Commvault SKUs will be available on the Cisco Price list.
“Commvault has a broad portfolio, and we package parts of it into discrete value offerings for ‘slices’ like virtualization,” Nimergood said. “We took the workloads for the Cisco data centre and built four specific SKUs that are very indigenous to those environments, and which encompass all the value for the resell motion.”
The first of these is scale-out capability. On top of that come additional SKUs for virtualization, for enterprise data protection and archiving, and for active copy data management for dev/test environments.
“We don’t have to throw whole kitchen sink of the price book at Cisco resellers, just the parts for Cisco that are relevant to them,” Nimergood said.
He also added that these four SKUs are not set in stone.
“We will look at it together with Cisco over time,” he said. “Next year, we might have six SKUs if we find other workloads where there is demand.”
Nimergood also indicated that in addition to this significant Cisco reselling addition, an important new engineering-based application of the relationship is also on the horizon.
“We are in the final throes of validating some next-gen architecture with Cisco around a scale-out hyperscale solution for protection in secondary storage that will be formally announced in mid-October,” he said.
