Commvault CEO Hammer Talks Up Data Management Platforms, Cloud Integration And Beating The Competition

Building A Data Platform For The Cloud

It has been a pretty good year for Commvault. The company's revenues for its second fiscal quarter 13 percent, led by a 22 percent gain in software sales, while it reduced its GAAP quarter loss to $800,000, down from last year's $4.6 million.

However, for Commvault CEO Robert Hammer, the real growth for the data protection and data management company is only beginning as customers look for ways to better manage data across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments in an integrated fashion.

At the same time, the 18-year-old storage software vendor has to keep an eye on competitors ranging from system vendors like Dell and HPE to upstarts, like Veeam, to stalwarts, like Veritas.

CRN recently discussed the changing data and information management environment with Hammer. To see where Commvault, and the industry as a whole, is moving, turn the page.

How has Commvault's business changed in the last couple years?

The cloud has become a major growth driver for us. As companies deal with the cloud, SaaS and the issues that go with managing information and data across different infrastructures, [things] have become a lot more complex to solve basic problems, whether it's data protection or secure access or dev/test or disaster recovery or governance. And a big one is securitization of the data inside the firewall. We've been able to establish a leadership position [with] big enterprises who are dealing with those types of issues. Those issues are more [prevalent] in the high end of the enterprise, government and the high-middle of the market.

Another thing that has worked quite well for us is, we have a number of stand-alone solutions in addition to the platform. Our platform has been our driver. We've also done quite well within the channel with our stand-alone solutions.

How important is a platform for Commvault vs. stand-alone solutions?

As we dramatically improve scale, improve workload portability for workloads across different applications, data types, and infrastructures, we made a lot of progress in innovating a technology to address those kind of issues.

In addition to that, we're enhancing the platform so that it can now deal effectively with software-defined storage for a number of critical use cases. We're talking about big data, Hadoop, images, seismic data, police data, things like that. We're coming out with a number of software-defined solutions for specific markets.

We've made a lot of progress with the business itself, and we've certainly established ourselves as having the leading platform for companies that are dealing with the cloud, and coming out with a whole lot of product to deal with these issues.

You talk about cloud as a main driver for Commvault's business. What has Commvault done to integrate cloud and on-premises data protection?

You have to have integration with different environments. Right now, we are highly-integrated with 27 different public clouds, which means you're dealing with all the standard virtualization environments. And then you've got to deal with all the different hypervisors, whether its Hyper-V or VMware or Oracle. And then the cloud environments are all different. AWS is different from Azure is different from Oracle is different from Google. You've gotta be connected and able to securely port workloads. Not only to ingest [but] how do I capture data, with these different infrastructures. I might store them in a different place. And I may extract or access from them completely differently. It's that flexibility and portability and scalability that distinguishes us.

What is the security impact from storing data in the cloud?

How do I authenticate a user, authorize access to data? How do I get this with just encryption and keys? Most of the providers today don't have a single way to encrypt and manage keys once data's captured. We do it one time, and we can manage it across all these different infrastructures.

In the past, that was a pretty simple process. Now, what I just described, internal to Commvault, is a combination of eight different services that bring in many different capabilities to solve a problem like that. Access and authentication and securitization is a lot more complicated today than it ever was.

The other issue that distinguishes us is that we always start with understanding the data. We index everything. That means we can put an almost infinite number of attributes on an object you're trying to store: What applications did it come from, what version of the application, who owns it, who has access to it.

How does that impact the Commvault platform?

If I'm on premises, if I don't understand the data I have, and now I want to utilize the cloud, I've gotta start looking at what I got, what am I going to move to the cloud, what am I going to delete, what am I going to keep? There are lots of use cases that start with, do I understand what I've got before I start putting a policy on it.

So it's the comprehensiveness and the granularity of managing across these environments. But you also require a massive amount of automation and orchestration to bring many different processes together and many different tools that may be Commvault tools or open source tools to solve a given problem. But you need to automate the management. Having a singular platform that can do those things allows you to do things others can't do faster, with less cost [but] higher reliability.

Competitors like Veeam or the new, independent Veritas also talk about platforms and integrating the cloud. What's different with Commvault?

Some of [those competitors] are talking about these as a vision. And nobody, including Veeam, has anywhere near the scalability or the flexibility or deals with the depth and breadth of environments, that Commvault does over the different types of applications, over physical and virtual environments, different cloud environments …

And quite frankly, we don't see Veritas in those markets. That's a vision for Veritas. It's not a reality. Our first platform with this general idea of what a platform should do, we came to market with it over 10 years ago. To build it with all those different functionalities in different environments has taken us a massive amount of time ...

Where others have talked about these being good ideas, we've done it. That's the big difference.

Practically all the system and storage vendors have been putting emphasis on data protection in their platforms. How does that differ from what Commvault is doing?

[Those solutions] don't have a ubiquitous platform that spans all the different on-premises IT infrastructures, mobile, all the different clouds, all the different types of legacy applications, all the distributed cloud-based applications. One comprehensive platform? They don't do that.

[Those competitors also deal] with snap and replication capabilities, which are pretty good. And they have a lot of use cases. But they can't be used for a lot of others. You don't have the knowledge of the data objects to cross the enterprise like I just described using snap and replication. The cloud providers don't do that. And that's why guys like Microsoft and AWS and Cisco … let go. They understand what our value-adds are on top of this. And the Nutanixs and the Pure Storages and the NetApps--we add value on top of their underlying IT infrastructure.

What is your definition of software-defined, and what is Commvault's approach?

When I say "software-defined," it means that, for certain use cases, we capture the data – it's written to our platform – and we do the indexing in real time. And then we will control the provisioning in the infrastructure. So if we're in a web-scale environment, a Hadoop environment, we are controlling the storage of that data on the nodes in that environment. We're doing all the data movement, all the provisioning, indexing and storing of the data in that environment. That is a significant amount of additional functionality that we have added to our platform.

How is that unique for Commvault?

We've always abstracted the physical from the logical right from day one when we started the company, 18 years ago. Secondly, our underlying architecture is a web-scale architecture, and has been since we first introduced the platform to the market over 10 years ago.

We had a web-scale structure, and we had the abstraction of the physical and logical. So our ability to now capture and use a Commvault file system to manage the movement and storage of that onto a web-scale infrastructure is added functionality.

[We] can ingest anything. We can ingest NFS, we can ingest CIFS. We're working with PACS systems. We provide a common layer for ingestion. We can cache it, and we can put it somewhere. We can put it on anything. We can put it on an array, we can put it on a cloud, we can put it on web-scale infrastructure.

How important is big data to your customers?

We're getting a lot of customers with big Hadoop clusters, and they need a way to archive in a way that the data is available to the application. You might have, say, police data where we can capture it, index it, or do criminal forensics on it. You can do the same with genomics data. There are big markets that have needs to solve those problems in scale. We're talking about simplifying processes … and you're enabling the customer to store that data on much less costly infrastructures including the cloud. Because it doesn’t matter where we put it. Once we grab it, we can put a policy on it. Maybe you want to keep that data on-premises for whatever reason, but in the long-term you might want to put it somewhere else. It could be tape, cloud, whatever, for long-term retention.

Commvault has not been very active in terms of acquisitions. Does Commvault have an acquisition strategy?

We have grown the company from the get-go organically. Part of the reason we've done that is we've had this platform that we were able to adapt to the changing needs of the market, and we built out its functionality. And we're doing that today at a faster pace than we've ever done.

Our ability to innovate and absorb that innovation in the market has been our priority. So there hasn't been a need, let's say, to acquire. Now, when you start to get into things like business analytics … you might see us partnering, or where some acquisitions might make sense. But I can tell you that, if I look out over the next few years, we've got the potential to significantly grow the company without acquisitions.

What are some things we can expect from Commvault in the near future?

[We're] making it easier to do business with Commvault, from a customer standpoint. Taking the massive sophistication we have, and just making it easier with easier-to-use user interfaces. Taking the complexity out of managing and reporting on these different processes. Pricing models that will make it easier for customers to buy. And a lot of things we're doing to help our partners do business with us.

[We're making a move] into software-defined storage, which we call software-defined data services, because we're actually marrying our data platform with the ability to manage the storage layer for certain use cases.

How about business process automation and analytics?

[That is an] inherent capability in the platform. We'll be enabling the platform for third-party developers sometime within the next 12 months. We're already building applications. We've already built two internally. One is the automation of all legal processes. We couldn't find a commercial product out there that enabled us to deal with the complexity of legal [issues like] contracts, NDAs, temporary licenses--there's a lot of contract work going on. To automate the system, we had to integrate with our SaaS solutions like NetSuite, Concur, Salesforce, etc. There wasn't a product out that that let us manage data where it lives in these SaaS environments to automate a process. We took that, and developed a process, we call it, "Quote For Cash."

These capabilities that we're building will be open to our customers and partners to innovate.

What is Commvault's channel strategy? Is the company making any changes in its approach to the channel?

We're putting a massive amount of investment and effort into expanding it for obvious reasons. We are coming out with so much more product that is more channel-friendly, so in terms of how we enable our partners and how we educate them, how they do business with us, we're putting a structure in place to do that.

The expansion of our channel partners and our strategic partners is significant, and we're putting the investment to back it up internally.

Are you recruiting channel partners?

Yes, in select areas. If I just take our core business, we're looking for partners who are willing to make a bigger commitment to Commvault with the breadth and depth of our product line. There are investments required with a product line this broad now.

Secondly, as we start to move into whether it's healthcare, whether it's big data, whether it's seismic, as we start to go into these different verticals, we're looking for partners with [strong] expertise. Then expand that to partners with certain expertise, like your global system integrators from a broader strategic point of view ...

And then we need channel partners in software-defined storage that have those kind of capabilities to manage and install on-premises, cloud-type, web-scale infrastructures.

How does Commvault work with strategic technology partners?

We're expanding our alliances. We have our traditional channel. But we're also doing a lot of work with the Microsofts, the AWSs, the Ciscos. And you'll see us engage with more strategics because we can do things that others can't do. It gets right back to, I've got on-premises, I've got SaaS, I've got public cloud, how do I tie these together? How do I deal with that if I have legacy on-premises and I want to do dev-test in the cloud and then tie those pieces together? We're seeing the need for that from a lot of enterprises, and it's a lot more complex than it sounds. You see simple DR [disaster recovery] solutions out there, but they don't solve a lot of core issues that customers have in these major enterprises.