Harnessing the Power of Data

Commvault is a leading provider of data protection and information management solutions that enables organisations to drive more value and business insight from their data.

It offers industry-leading data protection and recovery, cloud, virtualization, archive, file sync and share solutions, and is renowned for its vision and innovation and its dedicated focus on data management has made it the strategic partner of choice for many customers in this area of IT

The first thing anyone needs to understand about Commvault is that the company is not just about backup and recovery, says Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director EMEA. “While that is what we are famous for, and an area in which we continue to strive to extend our market share globally, our core data management platform is capable of delivering much more than this functionality. From the same consolidated, single platform our customers can support cloud driven, compliance, archiving, and end-point data management functionality that allows organisations to, not only mitigate risk around data protection and governance, but also get more value from their data and drive the productivity of their workforce.”

‘Unique’ is an over-used term in IT solution provisioning claims, but in the case of Commvault’s data management capabilities it is a completely correct statement to make.   Unlike nearly all of our competitors in the data management sector the company has never acquired another business and thus never diluted or compromised the vision and innovation of its developers by trying to bring two different sets of solutions together. The solution and all its functions are tightly integrated, and unmatched in terms of the number of vendors and solution providers that our platform can support – meaning our customers have the greatest flexibility to scale and change underlying infrastructures to best match their evolving requirements.

Commvault is already a very popular choice for larger organisations and works closely with SCC, in both the public and commercial sectors across both on-premise and cloud services. It is with local government, higher education and blue light services however that the partnership has proved particularly popular however. Anthony Capell, Partner Business Manager at Commvault, puts this down to the solution being just the right fit for the specific requirements of these (especially highly regulated) sectors.

“SCC, for us in the UK, has historically had an especially strong resonance in the public sector, built on long standing relationships and trusted, successful, implementations – and these are very important to us. Our solutions are especially relevant to these organisations because of the constant demand on the public sector to cut costs and do ‘more for less’.  Our ability to help deliver cost effective data centre consolidation, and increase efficiency is a critical differentiator.

Reducing cost and complexity

In a majority of these public sector organisations (as well as many within the private sector) data centre technologies have been acquired and built-up over the years in a disparate fashion. The Commvault solution works very well in these situations, because it simplifies operations and manages the data wherever it is, and on whatever platform it sits on – physical, virtual or cloud.

It reduces cost and complexity right across a hybrid cloud infrastructure. It also helps organisations consolidate all of their data protection requirements, and this requirement to get a single view of all aspects of data management, and often to simply understand where all their data is and what they actually have is very often the starting point of our conversations with many customers, says Tozer.

“Customers often have quite a fragmented set of data protection tools that they use to protect different parts of their legacy applications, systems and their virtual estate. If they are thinking about moving to a hybrid model, that’s going to add another layer of complexity.  This isn’t a school science experiment, where you can afford to try different things and see what happens, we are dealing with your business’s most critical assets – its data – and it is imperative it all runs without issue.

“Where multiple backup and recovery tools are in use, there is a lot of wasted resource and that’s why Commvault works so well for these organisations, because we can deal with the legacy systems, with Unix, Oracle and SAP, to name but a few of the biggest ones.  Our cloud tools support eight different hypervisors, so pretty much regardless of what they are using for virtualisation, we can support that and we also have a market-leading solution that can help people address what they want to do in the cloud.”

Cloud cover

Commvault can be used to manage resources inside Azure, AWS and supports 36 additional cloud storage platforms. There is no lock in, customers have the ability to use as many platforms as they wish and move data across them as required. It will support development and testing across different resources and handle multitenancy too.

These capabilities dovetail neatly with SCC’s approach with the Universal Cloud Gateway. Its Cloud Plus services for commercial customers and its Sentinel cloud service for the public sector and the two companies are now actively working on template services propositions that will match the specific needs of customers in different areas.

SCC’s value in the relationship is founded on its close and trusted engagement with the customer. “It’s the skill sets SCC has within the organisation, it’s the longevity of its business and the customer relationships they have”, says Capell. “They are the trusted advisor, within a lot of public sector and larger accounts.”

Commvault also needs a partner who understands the customer and can blend its technologies with others to suit the needs of the organisation, and of course, to provide the front-line customer account management and support. SCC adds its own value but with a 98 percent customer satisfaction rating for its service and support, SCC and its customers can be very confident that Commvault will be able to meet expectations.

Flourishing partnership

The two companies expect their partnership to flourish as more customers move towards a hybrid approach and make use of both on-premises and cloud-based resources. “The market is still in a state of transition and Commvault is an enabler for that”, says Capell. The point here of course, is that with its broad support for legacy systems and cloud services, Commvault can offer the widest available range of versatile and scalable data protection and management options.

This means it’s future-proofed as an application and enabler, whatever the consumption model. “Once Commvault is managing data – no matter where it resides and what it resides on – it remains the enabler, it manages the data and the next thing for us, is then how you start to make use of the power of that data to enable your business.”

With data often fragmented across many different locations and under the control of different applications, there is a real need to bring it together into a form in which it can be analysed in some depth. Commvault‘s powerful tools make it easier to harness this information and use it to drive positive advantage and business outcomes. Third parties can also make use of Commvault APIs to leverage the data store that it creates and enable customers to dig deeper into data and with a single unified platform.

Strategic investments

Commvault recently made an investment in Laitek, a company that specialises in rapid data migration and storage services for Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) replacement systems in the healthcare market. Electronic medical data is exploding in volume and the costs of storing, protecting, securing and making it available electronically are mushrooming. This strategic partnership between Commvault and Laitek will help hospitals to reduce these costs and maintain data in a vendor neutral format, providing affordable and secure long term storage.

It is a NASDAQ-listed (NASDAQ: CVLT), company and been named as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Centre Backup and Recovery Software for six years in succession.  In the most recent analysis (June 2016), it was placed highest on both the ‘completeness of vision’ and ‘ability to execute’ axes. The single unified platform that Commvault provides for data management is increasingly recognised as being well ahead of the competition.

Commvault and SCC are now developing their partnership into one that is much more strategic and solutions-focused, says Capell. This is significant as Commvault only works with a limited number of reseller. It sees the continued investment SCC is making in cloud services and helping customers to transition to new ways of managing IT systems, being ideal key to delivering the true value of its unified platform to customers who want to harness the real power of their data.