A year of transition to a more channel-focused organisation seems to be working for Commvault. Commvault’s Head of Worldwide Partnerships, Owen Taraniuk (pictured), says closer relationships with large channel vendors, a simplified product line and better internal organisation have put more business in the pipeline.
“We have had good alliances and a strong VAR community previously; we consciously decided to become more partner-driven a year ago. That has meant a lot of changes in the organisation and how we go to market, and the type of support we offer. There has also been a recognition that we were too complex to deal with and had too many SKUs.”
He says it has meant better frameworks for partner support - everything from a demand centre for interactive campaigns to a partner success desk to migrate presales direct access for VARs. There have been some new appointments, and a distribution strategy head is expected shortly.
Combined native offerings with Netapp and HPE have recently been announced – a consolidated approach allows their partners to buy from the price list directly, plus native integration all leading to new opportunities. The partners are seeing strong demand, he says, where Commvault’s data management capability means they have a more rounded offering. By combining, it increases their differentiation, and offers a better margin because there is more software. As the partnerships grow, there is an effect on sales cycles and lead times, currently four to twelve months.
It gives access to Commvault solutions without being a partner, but there is also a chance to “double dip” for those certified partners who want to offer more. “The feedback from VARs is very strongly in favour of this and we are seeing it reflected in pipeline growth.”
It is an evolving process and the company plans further big investments; the programme changes continuously based on feedback and market changes.
The channel dynamics are also changing a lot, channels are evolving and the rise of service provision has meant blurring of the types of channel. “In response we need to be many things to them and we are doing that in licensing, leveraging, cloud, as-a-service. Additionally, we have been working on the Commvault XaaS model and this will give a lot more flexibility. Enterprise customers are in multi-cloud fragmented environments, and will be able to use our technology with other alliances in the cloud in a more powerful way. This will be rolled out in the next year.”
Plans for 2019 are to continue to invest heavily in partners and technologies. “I think you will see us continue to evolve the go-to-market, particularly in cloud, and using AI and machine learning in data insights.”
“We continue to bring on talent, and this continues. We will shortly announce a new head of cloud and service providers, and a head of distribution strategy. The idea is to mature our distribution model and start to build partnerships with resources that can support the partners, with skills and training. That is something we have already started to invest in. Partners can work with us for professional resources and we partner using these resources and expect that, over time, we will be able to transfer those skills to distribution and the channel.”
