Commvault Cyber Resilience ‘Opening Doors’ for Channel Partners

“Over the last six to eight months, we’re walking through open doors, and we’re the cool kids in town.”

According to Commvault’s EMEA VP of channels, Jamie Farrelly, the acquisitions this year of cloud cyber resilience company Appranix, and AWS cloud specialist Clumio are proving to be game-changers for the vendor.

He said Commvault has also “transformed” its engagement with partners following the purchases, the launch of its clean room service, alongside the company’s merger with its cyber venture Metallic, creating Commvault Cloud, powered by Metallic AI.

“We really made a big shift toward how to drive a proper test and recovery strategy through cyber resilience,” explained Farrelly. “This is a real mix of technology and go-to-market with ecosystem. And I tend to use that word lightly, but it’s really transformed our engagement with all kinds of different route to market partners.”

Farrelly said Commvault partners can now interrogate customers on their ability to drive test and recovery across their production environments.

Commvault's Jamie Farrelly

“What we see … is that pretty much every organization on the planet does not have an overarching, holistic, deep ability to test and recover from any kind of breach,” he said.

Farrelly said with new regulations like DORA and NIS 2 on their way, it’s critical that businesses have a comprehensive plan to get their data back to production readiness.

Related:Pax8 Adds Cyber Resilience-Focused Commvault to Marketplace

“When you’re running multiple applications in complex environments, the best that even the most diligent customers could do is to maybe test one or two applications on a weekend. But you’re not ready for that cyber event. So we’ve been working extremely hard to educate both our partners and our customers that they’re not ready.”

Commvault’s Enterprise-Heavy Test and Recovery Strategy

Appranix specifically helps customers rebuild their cloud native applications “within minutes and hours rather than days and weeks,” said Farrelly.

“It’s OK recovering the data. But how long is it going to take for all your external customers to be trading again, to be production-ready? It can be weeks and weeks if you can’t rebuild your applications. So Appranix is an interesting one for all of our channel partners, because they can utilize their services to focus on solving a problem rather than building technology to rebuild applications, which is what takes the time.”

The exec said systems integrators (SIs) and alliances partners are all interested in this “enterprise-heavy test and recovery strategy that we’ve got."

“Because it solves a problem for them," he said, "and allows them to drive expansion into their existing customers. Then there’s a heavy services element around consultancy, but also implementing and running those systems, the cyber recovery strategy.”

Related:Commvault Unveils Strategic Integrations with Google Cloud, Splunk, Wiz, More

Gamification, Rebates on New Cyber Resilience Business

Farrelly also outlined several new initiatives for partners that diverge from the “traditional partner program.”

They include a new gamification platform across EMEA and India. It allows partners to interact with the company digitally to learn, gain certifications and share opportunities.

“We’ll be pushing that heavily as we move forward, probably taking it global as well,” he said.

Another recent launch is the "Bounty Bonus Rebate.”

“Partners that bring us deals over a certain size, that are deal registered and also new logo," Farrelly explained, "we give them 10% back on the land and expand bookings. Double-digit rebates [with] many vendors are a thing in the past. So we’re really looking to reward partners that bring us opportunities over a certain size that are focused on cyber resilience, because we need to solve this problem.”

Farrelly said Commvault’s focus going forward will be on investing in partner education, “so that we can make money together and solve customer problems, rather than [say], ‘Here’s a target, and if you hit it, you’re going to get 10%.’ We don’t do that anymore. We’ve removed that from our program. And that’s deliberate, because we don’t want that kind of churn approach. We need to be locked tight in it together as trusted advisors to the customer.”

Commvault SHIFT News

Commvault made several announcements at its SHIFT event in London last week. They include:

“If you’re not playing with the hyperscalers, you’re not navigating around the sun,” said Farrelly. “The Clumio acquisition is a real signpost of our dedication to really get deep into multicloud and specifically, in this case, AWS. [This is] focused on data protection and cyber resilience around AWS workloads, and therefore AWS customers.”