Commvault Partners Welcome New CEO's Commitment to Channel

(Pictured above: Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani on stage at Commvault Go this week in Denver.)

COMMVAULT GO — Commvault’s new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, assured partners he will continue to drive the company’s push to become a more channel-friendly provider of data protection solutions. Addressing 500 partners at the Commvault GO 2019 conference this week in Denver, Mirchandani introduced the new go-to-market executive team and promised new opportunities for growth.

“This is the new Commvault,” Mirchandani said at the company’s second annual Partner Xchange event, which took place in concert with Commvault GO. “I’ve been in this racket for over 30 years and I’ve never built a business anywhere on the planet without a partnership, without channel partners. And a partnership for me is when both sides feel like they win together. And that’s what I’ve been sharing with my team as we build this company.”

Mirchandani, who took the helm of Commvault in February after serving as CEO of DevOps platform provider Puppet, has held executive roles at VMware, EMC and Microsoft, where the channel and professional services played an integral part of his responsibilities. In less than nine months since arriving at Commvault, Mirchandani has brought in new go-to-market leadership including channel veteran chief revenue officer Riccardo DiBlasio, and last month elevated Carmen Sorice as go-to-market chief of staff.

At Commvault Partner Xchange, DiBlasio announced the company’s new VP of worldwide channels Mercer Rowe, a protégé of Mirchandani, along with former Cisco senior VP of worldwide channels Edison Peres. Rounding out the go-to-market push, Mirchandani recently brought in his former colleague at Puppet and longtime leader of EMC’s global services team, Sandra Hamilton, as VP of customer success.

Under Mirchandani’s direction, the company also overhauled its marketing with new logos and a revamped website designed to drive more sales to partners.

“Everything about us – you see the colors, you see the brand, you see the products, you see the innovation, you see the engagement – and even if you’re not convinced yet, I promise you for the next couple of days and the weeks and the months of the quarters to come, you’re going to see the new Commvault,” he told partners.

Sorice, speaking to partners, underscored changes and improvements in its incentives launched in July, including new rebates, year-end bonuses and new business development funds.

Commvault’s Carmen Sorice

“We were hearing from you throughout the year, that you wanted to get more financial incentives in play, to help you grow your business profitably, and we did it in a way that’s predictable,” Sorice said.

Commvault rolled out the updated program to cover the full program year, Sorice added.

“So you can make your investment decisions on what you want to do with Commvault and how you want to train your people based on a year-long program that will be rolled out, rather than coming out with a monthly or quarterly spiff that causes you to kind of juggle things around,” he said. “And we think the upfront incentives are compelling enough for you to make some investment decisions to take the next step in this partnership.”

The 500 partners attending this year’s conference is a significant increase from last year’s 284, and represents roughly one-quarter of the 2,000 attendees, with the rest primarily consisting of Commvault’s customers, according to Sorice. Partners in the exhibit hall told Channel Futures they like the company’s new image and broadened product portfolio, which includes its …

… new midmarket-focused venture – dubbed Metallic – and plans to expand into software-defined storage with last month’s acquisition of Hedvig. Commvault also offered simplified SKUs of Activate, a data analytics and e-discovery tool launched last year.

“I’ve met Sanjay and I’ve met a number of the new leadership teams and I’m pleased with the direction things are going,” said Kevin Cronin, VP of sales at Kelyn Technologies, a Commvault partner that offers data-center infrastructure hardware, software and services. “I have a great degree of confidence that they’ll be able to make the changes necessary to propel Commvault.”

Renaat Dumon, a technical consultant at Belgium-based Proximus, said July’s channel partner program upgrades will make it easier to train more of the company’s engineers to implement Commvault’s broadening lineup of products and services.

CDW’s Jeffrey Godlewski at Commvault Go 2019

“We really like the revamped program,” Dumon said. “It’s really beneficial to us. All of a sudden, we have these business development funds, which is nice because it helps us to train more people, do events and have joint communications.”

Jeffrey Godlewski, manager of data center solution architects at CDW, said Commvault has stepped up its channel commitment this year since Mirchandani arrived.

“The old Commvault didn’t understand the channel,” Godlewski said. “The technology was always there. I wouldn’t say they weren’t channel-friendly, but the channels were complicated. Now they have the right people in place. Everyone I’ve seen come on is channel, channel, channel, and they’ve been in the channel 10, 15 or 20 years so they really understand the channel.”