Commvault formally launches its as-a-Service portfolio, which has been on the market in some geos for several months. Three services are available now, with more to come.
Al Bunte, Commvault’s COO
NASHVILLE – Data protection vendor Commvault formally announced their Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery as-a-Service [B&RaaS] portfolio at their GO event for customers and partners here. The dominant theme around the event was the importance of their newly restructured product portfolio, which has been reduced from 25 separate product lines to four. Two of these, the as-a-Service portfolio and the Commvault Activate data discovery solution, underwent soft launches months ago. They were both branded and ‘formally’ launched at GO to enhance their visibility.
“We are entering the SaaS business, because infrastructure consumption has fundamentally changed,” said Sabrinath Rao, General Manager of Commvaut’s worldwide cloud business.
The portfolio provides the same capabilities as the flagship Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery offering, except in a SaaS model. Out of the gate, three services are available: Commvault Complete B&RaaS; Commvault Complete B&RaaS for Virtual Machines (VMs); and Commvault Complete B&RaaS for Native Cloud Applications.
“In addition to the pay-as-you- go consumption model, there is lower friction to purchase, with pricing starting at .48 cents per GB per month,” Rao stated.
“We have had several large and well attended breakouts on this at this event,” said Al Bunte, Commvault’s Chief Operating Officer. “The idea is to take the idea of simplification all the way with this, where we just provide an SLA and a service.”
While these services are relatively new, Commvault’s relationship with service provider partners is not.
“We’ve spent the last three or four quarters drilling down on a ‘better together’ strategy around this, but we have been involved with service providers for five or six years,” Bunte said. “It’s an effective way to get to the lower end of the market. Many of our resellers have also adopted more services offerings. So this is a natural move for us. In addition, while this starts in the low end, it keeps coming up, moving up the food chain to mid-sized accounts.”
Bunte said this model has strong enterprise potential as well.
“We see many large customers going to the shared services market, so even if they manage it themselves, having all these as-a-service capabilities offerings for their end users is key. Enterprise accounts want a utility pricing model – priced as they use the service. We are moving on this. It could go all the way to the enterprise on different versions of as-a-service.”
The cloud marketplaces are a natural for the extension of this SaaS strategy. Commvault is starting out at launch with these services being available on the AWS Marketplace.
“The AWS Marketplace is a pre-existing system that has thousands of customers ready to purchase,” Rao said. It’s the logical place to start, but the plan is to expand beyond that before the end of the calendar year.
“We are putting together a market space that connects to cloud marketplaces around the planet,” Bunte said. “We will get more aggressive in our fiscal Q4 and in Q1, and we are getting our partnerships aligned for this.”
Commvault expects broad partner pickup for this from a broad range of partners.
“There will be a lot of partner pull on this,” Bunte said. “It will include the big cloud guys and large service providers, but we think almost any route to market could use this solution set.”
While there is clearly a market for this, not all partners expect to be besieged by new customer orders.
“We have 150 Commvault customers, and have offered our own managed services in the past, but only three of our Commvault customers are using our managed services,” said Damon Robertson, Managing Director of U.K-based Commvault Platinum partner COOLSPIRiT, Commvault’s 2017 European partner of the year. “We are hoping to grow this with the Commvault services, but our experience to date with our customer base is that midmarket customers tend to want to look after this themselves.” It’s too early yet to get a handle on the popularity of the Commvault services. Robertson indicated that while they have been available to U.S. partners since March, they have only just become available in the U.K.
On the other hand, cloud solution provider Britesky, which is based in the western part of the Ottawa region, and which is focused specifically on the cloud market, is extremely optimistic.
“We have had a subscription model for the last year and a half, and so are already selling these kinds of services,” said Richard Losier, Britesky’s VP of Technology. “We’ve had a lot of good conversations with customers at GO about this. While there are a lot of big CSPs out there, there is still a gap in their offerings, and we slot ourselves very well for gaps in the Azure and AWS portfolios.”
Other services are on the roadmap.
“There is no DRaaS [Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service today – but it’s coming,” said Don Foster, Commvault’s Senior Director of Worldwide Solutions Marketing.
