Commvault has hired Karen Falcone as VP of worldwide cloud and service providers. The move comes as the data protection company's CEO crown transitions from Bob Hammer to Sanjay Mirchandani.
Falcone arrives at Commvault with an extensive background in partner-centric operations. Most recently, she was responsible for developing and scaling Sungard Availability Services’ EMEA Channel organization based in London. There, she built relationships with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Dell EMC, while globalizing Sungard’s channel partner program.
For her part, Falcone says she was impressed by Commvault’s Channel Transformation Strategy and its move to execute the plan, including channel program enhancements, product simplification, and strong hires. “The role is exciting and appealed to me as I know Cloud Alliances and Service Providers are critical to growth and Commvault is in a great spot with its market-leading technology,” she told ChannelE2E.
Commvault's Channel Evolution
According to Falcone, channel partners are seeking better ways to support their customers’ multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.
Falcone points out that more than 81 percent of companies have a multi-cloud strategy using up to five cloud providers. Most of them use a hybrid of private and public cloud options. As a result, she believes data management and protection in this new world is critical.
“We are leveraging an integrated go-to-market model with our channel partners and public cloud providers to ensure customers are protecting their workloads as they move data to the cloud,” she said.
As for Commvault’s partners, Falcone believes there is an opportunity for growth surrounding Software as a Service (SaaS). Commvault partners have been making the transition to services over the last few years. This provides them the opportunity to offer services on top of Commvault’s software or even develop their own services with Commvault’s technology and help build new revenue streams around data management.
Commvault’s New Leadership Team
Falcone’s joins Commvault less than one month after the company confirmed the imminent CEO transition from Hammer to Mirchandani.
That hunt for a new chief executive took nearly a year after the company bowed to activist investor Elliott Management, agreeing to search for a new leader.
Commvault has made a number of recent high-profile hires, including the appointments of Rick Fairweather as VP of Americas Channels and Mark Fong as VP of Asia Pacific Channels and Alliances.
All of these appointments come at a time when Commvault is trying to transform its data protection business for the cloud era.
From Falcone’s perspective, the fact that the company took time assembling and developing the current leadership can only be a good thing.
“The future is bright for Commvault in the Channel. We have a strong leadership team led by a new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, who is very channel focused,” she explained to ChannelE2E. “Transforming to a partner-led organization opens up exponential opportunities to grow by leveraging our multi-route strategy - resellers, distributors, alliance partners, and cloud providers. The current leadership team has strong and deep background in building successful channel programs with innovative approaches to identifying needle moving initiatives to help drive joint revenue with our partners.”
Backup, Disaster Recovery (BDR) & Data Protection: Intense Competition
Under Hammer, Commvault has spent the past year accelerating its shift from traditional technology sales toward recurring revenues along with managed and cloud services opportunities for partners.
The company has made considerable progress, but an activist investor set the stage for the CEO transition amid growing competition from such companies as Cohesity, Datto, Druva, Rubrik and Veeam, plus service enhancements such classic brands like Arcserve and Veritas.
Datto has aligned with MSPs in the SMB market, while Veeam has been very successful partnering with CSPs in the midmarket and enterprise. Among the reasons both companies enjoy success: Smaller MSPs can plug into Datto's cloud, while larger MSPs and CSPs deploy and manage Veeam in their preferred clouds.
Despite all that competition, Commvault’s efforts are showing signs of success. The company’s fiscal Q3 2019 results, released in January 2019, exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. Overall revenue grew only two percent compared to the corresponding quarter in 2018, but the company showed progress on the “repeatable revenue” front, where figures rose 15 percent.
