Commvault’s head of Worldwide Partners and Market Development comments on the significance of the new NetApp relationship as part of Commvault’s broader strategy, and indicated customers and partners can look for more such relationships.
Owen Taraniuk, Head of Worldwide Partnerships and Market Development, Commvault
NASHVILLE — When Owen Taraniuk moved from VP of Asia Pacific and Japan to the Head of Worldwide Partnerships and Market Development earlier this year, he promised a major expansion of Commvault’s strategic initiatives. The first such expansion, their reworking of their long-time Cisco relationship into a full-blown go-to-market partnership, in which Commvault appeared on Cisco’s price lists for the first time, was heralded by Taraniuk as a model for future efforts. At Commvault’s GO customer and partner event here, these efforts were again expanded significantly. A limited go-to-market relationship with NetApp has been turned into a full resell model, and Commvault’s go-to-market relationship with HPE has also been expanded significantly.
The expansion of the NetApp relationship is a major one, in which a decade-long technology relationship with a limited go-to-market component is now expanded into a full go-to market expansion, in the same vein that Commvault has had with Cisco since late 2017.
“What we had before with NetApp was their ability to resell a subset of our products, our IntelliSnap data management software,” Taraniuk said. Now the Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery Software – their single core offering in this space since the simplification of their product portfolio this summer – has been aligned with the NetApp Data Fabric, and can be resold directly by NetApp and NetApp channel partners, for on-prem, hybrid and pure cloud environments.
“Our go-to-market strategy is now much more aligned with NetApp’s on data protection,” Taraniuk added. “Before, NetApp had their own offering for us, and they had a niche offering as well. They didn’t have a DR leg to their strategy at all. Now with the fuller integration of our solution into their Fabric, we have a much stronger relationship.”
Joint customers who find that the limited partnering around IntelliSnap fits their needs will be able to stay with that.
“Customers with this older version will be able to retain that, and have the option of migrating up when they want,” said Wenceslao Lada, Commvault’s Vice President, Worldwide Alliances.
NetApp is making a major thrust in the cloud market, which Taraniuk believes will help Commvault in that space
“We are agnostic to the environment, and are strong in both cloud and hybrid cloud,” he said.
“With our cloud capabilities, customers are not forced to stay in any type of storage after it is initially placed there,” Lada added.
Commvault also announced an expansion of their go-to-market relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE]. It begins with full integration between Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery Software and HPE StoreOnce deduplication systems, including integration with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst. In addition, the HPE GreenLake consumption as-a–service model sold through HPE Pointnext, which was formerly almost entirely direct until being largely opened up to the channel earlier this year, is being expanded.
Commvault solutions have been available through HPE GreenLake on a pay-per use basis for about five months
“As HPE enters their new selling year, they are significantly expanding the relationship with Commvault around GreenLake,” Taraniuk said. “It is now in mainstream launch stage and this business is being increased and becoming a key stage. We have multiple consumption-as-a service offerings now through strategic partners, and what we are looking for is how we can add a catalogue level. Once you land as a SaaS offering, that makes us very ubiquitous, which is a large part of our strategy.”
“We also are selling our Commvault Hyperscale appliance around HPE Apollo high-density servers,” Lada said.
Commvault has built out a large ecosystem of strategic alliances as a key part of its go-to-market strategy, and Taraniuk said that they will continue to expand this further.
“We have a roadmap for expanding it,” Taraniuk said. One likely candidate is Huawei, although their security-related issues in North America mean that this partnership is more likely to impact other geos to a much greater extend.
“Technically, we have a global model with them, and we are looking to grow that,” he stated. “It’s really more LatAm and western Europe focused. ECen through they have little presence in North America, they still want to do $190 billion in revenue.”
Taraniuk emphasized that these major strategic partnerships by definition have to be significant to make them worthwhile.
“It’s a huge investment for us in cash and resources to stand up these relationships,” he said. “So we have to be sure that what we do provides additive value for customers. We don’t just want to be niche – and we do have finite resources.”
