Manoj Nair, who took over as GM of Metallic in May, talks with ChannelBuzz about the launch in Canada, and what the plans are for Metallic beyond that.
Manoj Nair, GM of Metallic, a Commvault venture.
Last fall, at their Commvault GO event in Denver, data protection vendor Commvault launched Metallic, a new SaaS service which was set up as a separate division within Commvault. Three services were available: Metallic Core Backup & Recovery; Metallic Office 365 Backup & Recovery; and Metallic Endpoint Backup & Recovery. The expectation then was that these offerings would play lower in the market than Commvault’s traditional enterprise business, focusing on the midmarket and the top part of the SMB. Out of the gate, Metallic was limited to the U.S. market, however.
Now Commvault has launched Metallic in Canada, their first expansion beyond the U.S. The GM of Metallic is now Manoj Nair, who joined Commvault from HyperGrid in May. He replaces Rob Kaloustian, long-time Commvault executive, who moved on from the company earlier this year.
When Commvault launched Metallic last fall, they chose to start with a select cadre of U.S.-based partners – CDW, Insight, Sirius, Microsoft, and distributors Arrow, and Ingram Micro. That has only been expanded slightly since, with the recent addition of Zones. At the Canadian launch, the channel partners include the Canadian arms of CDW and Insight, along with Canadian headquartered VARs Compugen and Long View, and distributor Arrow Canada.
“This is our first expansion beyond the launch in the U.S., and we are learning a lot,” Nair told ChannelBuzz. “The world is also changing as we speak. Back in April we decided to do something to assist the customers who had moved to working from home, and we launched our Customer Care Program, which offered free Metallic Endpoint Backup and Recovery until September. Canada was a part of that.”
The several hundred customers who signed up for this program included some enterprise names, which was not the expected market for Metallic when it launched.
“That was a surprise,” Nair said. “There is enterprise demand for this. It’s not just midmarket. We go where the customers pull us, which also includes collaboration. There’s a strong market there, and many who do Microsoft 365 backup just do Exchange. We are broader than that, which is important when Teams has grown by 9x.”
Nair said that the SaaS offering potentially cannibalizing from the legacy Commvault offerings isn’t a real concern.
“One of the things that attracted me to Metallic is that they were not afraid to disrupt themselves,” he noted. “That’s the classic innovator’s dilemma, and it’s a great thing from our perspective.”
Nair outlined the different elements of the Metallic road map going forward.
“One of the ways the road map has evolved is the focus around global expansion, which has been one of the big pushes I have made since arriving,” he said. “We are getting global demand now, and so we will be adding a lot more.”
Metallic is not yet available specifically for MSPs, but Nair said there is interest there, and getting Metallic ready for this market is a priority.
“We will be doing some things there,” he said. “There is pull from MSP partners. We have a couple design partners who are working with us on the MSP front and we should be able to talk more about that later this year. It’s something we are actively working on.”
Other priorities include adding bringing more depth and granular capabilities to the existing offerings, as well as adding more services as it makes sense.
“The other area we are very focused on is adding cloud-native capabilities,” Nair said.
