Changing the data game

Globally, Commvault has announced a multi-pronged transformation plan. Can you give us a regional perspective?

Since 2015, we have been executing on a plan to grow the market share and expand coverage. As a result, our growth is now in double digits. The changing threat landscape coupled with regulatory compliance is driving organisations to invest more in data management and protection solutions. What we are bringing to the table for our customers is RoI and TCO, not just technology.

We have expanded our team and extended coverage across the Middle East including the Levant. We have opened offices in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt. In fact, we recorded our highest business in Q1 this year even in the midst of a general market slump. Today, customers are willing to invest in the right value that brings them operational and cost efficiencies, and that is exactly what we offer.

Commvault has recently partnered with a slew of public cloud providers. Is your strategy going to be around hybrid IT environments?

Cloud is a key strategy for Commvault. If you look at all major cloud service providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, they are all looking for data-protection solutions and tools that can easily migrate data from on-premises to the cloud. This is the reason why they have chosen Commvault as we offer the only flexible cloud management platform with a unique data indexing technology. This allows customers to migrate their workloads to public cloud or even within the cloud seamlessly. We offer one single platform for cloud backup, recovery, management and e-discovery.

Is cloud computing gaining momentum in the Middle East?

Compared to other developed markets in EMEA, this region may have been a bit late to get onto the cloud bandwagon due to regulations on data sovereignty. However, cloud is gaining steam as more and more customers are starting to trust the technology and its benefits. All the top public cloud service providers are setting up shop here. AWS is opening data centres in Bahrain and Saudi; Microsoft and Oracle have announced plans to set up cloud data centres in the UAE. This will help customers feel more confident in terms of compliance. Historically, cloud in this region has been offered mainly by telecom service providers, but it was more around co-location or infrastructure-as-a-service. I believe the real business value of cloud computing is in moving your applications, not just infrastructure.

Last year, Commvault has rolled out hyperscale appliance and software. Is this a new architecture?

Yes, we believe scale-out architecture will become dominant in enterprise data centres. All customers have IT silos, and traditional appliance hardware for data protection can’t cope with the growth in data. We have aligned with multiple hardware vendors such as Cisco, Huawei and HPE to create reference architectures that we can offer to our customer base either in our own appliance or third-party hardware. These are tested and validated data management and protection solutions that can speed up deployment times so that customers don’t have to waste time in configuring and can scale up to petabytes.

Why is scale-out preferred over scale-up?

The traditional approach is to get an appliance and when you need to expand capacity, stack more appliances on top of that. But the problem with scale-up is that none of these appliances can cascade, which means you can’t implement deduplication across the entire data set. This defeats the whole purpose of the technology. If you are an enterprise customer, you can’t keep filling your data centre with appliances and hardware. What makes us different is our intelligent software, not specialised hadware. When you talk about petabytes, none of the hardware vendors can do this in one single appliance. Our software will allow you to cascade servers and make it hyperscale. We don’t use dedicated hardware but do this on general purpose hardware. This shows real value to our customers in terms of sizing of hardware, power and footprint. If you are a customer with five petabytes of data, with certain technologies you’d typically need a minimum of two purpose-built appliances; we can do this with just five general purpose server-based storage nodes, completely eliminating the need for expensive storage controllers and dedicated media servers.