Commvault has named former Puppet executive Sanjay Mirchandani as president and CEO, succeeding Bob Hammer. Also, Nick Adamo moves to chairman of the board. Both changes will become effective April 18.
Mirchandani has held senior leadership positions at VMware, EMC and Microsoft. At Puppet, he grew the user base of Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to more than 40,000, including 75 percent of the Fortune 100.
The CEO transition comes nearly a year after Commvault bowed to activist investor Elliot Management and agreed to search for a new company leader.
No doubt, Hammer deserves credit for building one of the world's most successful data protection businesses. The company's market cap is roughly $3.1 billion amid the CEO transition.
Still, Commvault faces challenges on multiple fronts -- from entrenched rivals to fast-growth competitors to cloud-scale upstarts. The hyper-competitive market now includes well-funded names like Cohesity, Datto, Druva, Rubrik and Veeam, just to name a few.
Amid all that competition, Commvault has been overhauling and expanding its on-premises product lines to extend out to the cloud. The company has also seen some turnover in its channel leadership over the past year.
The Commvault business makeover is showing some signs of progress ahead of Mirchandani's April arrival. The company's fiscal Q3 2019 results, announced in January 2019, beat Wall Street's expectations. Overall revenue grew only 2 percent vs the corresponding quarter last year. But the company points to progress on the "repeatable revenue" front, where revenues grew 15 percent.
