Commvault’s Metallic SaaS offering has not yet been available to MSP partners, but it will be coming to both sets of MSP partners ‘soon,’ and the company believes it will be highly attractive to both large and small MSPs.
John Tavares, Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances at Commvault
Data protection provider Commvault has announced new programmatic support for both large and small MSP partners within their Commvault Partner Advantage program. Two new partner tiers have been created. The Managed Service Provider tier is for larger providers of managed services, who have direct relationships with Commvault. The Aggregator Partner Advantage tier is for smaller MSPs, who can help Commvault scale in the mid-sized to small business market, and who work through distribution.
“This is not a new program, but it is a major enhancement to the way that our existing Partner Advantage program handles MSPs,” said John Tavares, Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances at Commvault. “The Partner Advantage program was designed for resell – not for MSPs or service providers. So for the purposes of MSPs, there was effectively no program for them. That’s why we are so excited about this. We are building an MSP platform inside our existing partner program framework, offering them predictable, consumption-based pricing, and also giving them access to a whole new set of technical enablement tools specifically designed for them.”
Market demand for services had reached, and exceeded, the point where this kind of MSP support made sound sense for Commvault.
“The market for Data Protection as-a-Service is approaching a 15.3 billion market,” Tavares noted. Backup as-a-Service is growing 19.8% this year. Our partners are expecting 66% of their revenue to come from managed services.
“That’s one reason we built this into the program,” Tavares said. “The other reason is that partners asked us to. Our MSP business has been growing fast without these enhancements to the program. But putting them in place will make it simpler for partners to do business with us.”
Commvault is expecting the new partner program tiers to lead to an increase in the number of partners.
“We think that this with this addition it will bring that missing link and really accelerate partners’ ability to have more success,” Tavares noted. “We expect that it will add more partners in the Aggregator space definitely, but also in the larger MSP tier.”
A major incent for the recruitment of new partners will be the forthcoming availability of Commvault’s Metallic SaaS offering to MSP partners.
“Once our Metallic SaaS offering is released with an MSP version, it will dramatically affect our ability to impact a much larger group of MSPs,” Tavares said. “We believe Metallic for MSP will be a flywheel for the space, which will unlock a lot of net new MSPs for us, both with our larger MSP partners and with our Aggregator partners. Both groups will benefit from Metallic.”
So when exactly will the MSP version of Metallic be available for partners. Tavares was able to say only that it will be coming ‘soon.’
“We have to build a lot of back-end systems for this, but we have a strong design partner,” he noted.
