CEO Sanjay Mirchandani: Commvault Is Future-Ready

‘Commvault is really, really ready for the future. ... Together, our best-in-class portfolio and enhanced partner ecosystem make it easier for IT professionals to move beyond the complexity and seize the opportunity in the cloud, ultimately to be ready for whatever radical change comes next,’ says Mirchandani during his Commvault Future Ready keynote.

Businesses face a growing array of challenges on the IT front, and it is up to their vendors and other partners to help find ways to simplify those journeys.

That‘s the message from Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, who opened his company’s Commvault Future Ready conference with a live on-line keynote in which he said the conference theme of “future ready” is more than just a tagline.

“Now, more than ever, CIOs and IT professionals need to be ready for anything in the future,” Mirchandani said.

[Related: CEO Sanjay Mirchandani On Commvault Metallic And Microsoft Azure, COVID-19]

The value in Commvault has not been in meeting the “new normal,” said Glenn Dekhayser, field chief technology officer at Red8, a Costa Mesa, Calif.-based solution provider and Commvault channel partner.

“Its value is in having a platform that can lead into the future,” Dekhayser told CRN.

Commvault has built an extensible platform in its Data Platform, Dekhayser said.

“The Data Platform will extend to problems that no one has even thought about yet,” he said. ”In five years, when the cloud changes, and when containers change, Commvault will be the quickest to change their platform because they own their own code.”

For those managing data, there has never been a more perilous time than now because their companies have been on one IT journey or another for a while, always moving from something to something else, Mirchandani said.

“This results in more infrastructure, more applications, and more complexity than they should have to manage,” he said. ”This is only intensified by the non-stop security threats and the rapid change we‘ve experienced over the past few months.”

A big part of that journey is making everything in IT cloud-enabled, cloud-ready, and cloud-opportunistic, but it is time to start using the cloud for what it was built, Mirchandani said. At the same time, the tasks associated with moving to the cloud have become too complex.

“Enterprises need to reduce complexity and simplify everything they do to make it easier to manage, and to fully leverage the skills they have,” he said. ”Tools and technologies need to be low-touch, and light-touch, while consolidating random point solutions and work as promised.”

Data remains at the heart of all digital transformations, and it needs to be intelligently managed, Mirchandani said.

“This is where Commvault comes in,” he said. ”We‘re hear to help IT professionals become truly future-ready by providing unmatched data awareness, agility, and automation across the organization.”

Commvault thrives on solving hard data-related problems, Mirchandani said. This, he said, is reflected in both the company‘s product directions and in its partnerships.

That focus has resulted in several key additions to the company‘s product portfolio, much of which have simplicity at the core, he said.

As part of that push, Commvault on Tuesday unveiled the next generation of its HyperScale technology, which is its fully integrated scale-out data management technology available as software or as an appliance.

This new offering, HyperScale-X, features the software-defined storage technology it got with its September, 2019 acquisition of Hedvig. Mirchandani said HyperScale-X takes advantage of Commvault‘s Hedvig technology to deliver a simple, flexible data management solution for all workloads including containers, virtual machines, databases, and more.

“It‘s optimized for scalability, comes built-in with ransomware protection, and quite simply with Hedvig’s technology, HyperScale-X brings together storage and data management, and is the solution to simplify and accelerate hybrid cloud adoption,” he said.

Second, Commvault has made significant advances in the two largest use cases for its Commvault Complete data protection technology with its new Commvault Backup & Recovery offering and a new cloud-enabled disaster recovery product called Commvault Disaster Recovery.

Both are available as stand-alone offerings, or as a new Commvault Complete data protection product, Mirchandani said.

Commvault also introduced new native API enhancements in its Hedvig distributed storage platform to help give customers increased flexibility in running modern applications in any Kubernates environment. This includes the ability to seamlessly migrate, protect, and use data.

“Kubernates environments don‘t scare us,” he said. ”They are the new frontier for dev/ops, and we will take the ’ops’ out of dev/ops by automating mundane infrastructure activities.”

Partners are also key to the future, as Commvault wants to extend the simplification of its products to the cloud, Mirchandani said.

IT organizations have had to manage the complexity of working across multiple vendors, he said.

“However, the onus needs to be on us IT providers to work well with others and to make it easier to find, to buy, to deploy, and to use our combined solutions,” he said. ”Our commitment to working with partner technologies and partners overall is key to how we bring value to our customers, and always has been.”

For that reason, Commvault last week launched a new partner program with simplified processes to better enable partners to work with the company and with joint partners. This includes Commvault‘s new strategic relationship with Microsoft Azure to simplify customers’ journeys to the cloud, Mirchandani said.

“Commvault is really, really ready for the future, and is a force to be reckoned with,” he said. ”Together, our best-in-class portfolio and enhanced partner ecosystem make it easier for IT professionals to move beyond the complexity and seize the opportunity in the cloud, ultimately to be ready for whatever radical change comes next.”