Commvault Adds Former Sungard AS Channel Exec to Team

As the company plays catch-up in the channel, Commvault has spent the past year building a robust executive channel leadership team. The most recent addition is Wednesday’s announcement naming Carmen Sorice as vice president of worldwide route services, a newly created position at the company.

More familiarly, Sorice is responsible for partner enablement, demand generation, partner programs and operations. He reports to Owen Taraniuk, global head of partnerships and market development, whose job is to create and execute the company’s global go-to-market strategy and indirect partnerships.

Commvault’s Carmen Sorice

“What brings me here is Commvault’s interest and investment in becoming more partner-driven,” Sorice told Channel Partners. “My role existed at Commvault in various regional theaters and functions throughout the company, but we didn’t have one global face of resources that [is] solely dedicated to our partners’ success.”

Although the new executive is being formally introduced today, Sorice began his job in September.

Sorice brings to the job a year of experience as founder and CEO of Qlarity, a provider of multicloud advisory services and channel and sales solutions, about nine years as senior vice president of global channels at Sungard Availability Services, and other endeavors.

“Commvault has undertaken a major redeployment of resources across its sales, partner and field marketing organizations to create new teams dedicated to Commvault’s alliance partners, VARs, distributors, service providers and global systems integrators,” said Taraniuk. “Commvault has improved all aspects of partner engagement to make it easier to do business with Commvault, understand our product offerings, and take full advantage of the growing opportunities with customers in the backup and recovery and data management markets.”

With 2019 around the corner, Sorice has several goals, both within the company and with partners, that he’s setting his sights on. Internally, he wants to align the organization on a single focus that’s partner-driven and to execute that strategy.

“Externally, my goal is to grow our partner revenue in our next fiscal year in two ways — primarily, by working with top producing partners and, strategically and surgically, figur[ing] out what gaps we need to fill that would require us to go out and recruit new partners,” he said.

A tactical goal is to look across the partner base and look at the number of sellers within the partner’s business that are selling with Commvault.

“And we’re looking to double the number of sellers,” said Sorice.

As far as challenges that Sorice foresees, Commvault is doing what’s necessary to scale and take the company to the next level.

“To do that, the company recognized that we need to do more to be partner-driven,” he said. “Some of our competitors have been more active in this space.”

He noted that data management and backup are healthy, growing technologies in the industry.

“What we have the opportunity to do is demonstrate to our partners, and they demonstrate to their customers, is that with Commvault solutions, partners are able to solve for a lot of the customer problems regardless of the infrastructure or workloads they’re moving because we have a complete portfolio of data management.”