David West, SVP WW Marketing and Business Development at CommVault Systems, discussed the shift from seeing data backup and recovery as an afterthought to a driver of business value with theCUBE host Dave Vellante, live at VMWorld 2013.

“Backup and recovery in a virtual environment, especially with mission critical applications, is very different,” West said. “It’s having an application-aware view, and technologies that are able to do snapshot management” while offering data protection. Companies are now looking to get the SLAs that they need now that they’ve got a massive amount of apps running on the server.

CommVault is best known for being a leader in the data protection space in the backup and recovery industry. Its approach is to “start with making sure we understand the application, then tie into the storage layer underneath, to make sure we provide the right performance” to customers. CommVault customers “start with solving backup and recovery, then moving to manage replication, archiving and compliance.” The approach is getting tools and solutions addressing how to make virtualized environments more efficient.

Turning saved data into a business asset

The frustration with backup is that it does not add any direct business value, according to Dave Vellante. He asked how CommVault took the data and offered additional value, helping customers reduce copies, and protect data off-site. “It is all about the data, and I think backup and recovery has gotten to how do I take all my data management and turn it into a business asset,” West said. “You have to do it in a single platform, that does backup, archiving, replication, search, ediscovery. I garner intelligence as I move the data in a single platform. It’s not just about protecting data, and staying compliant, it’s taking the massive data and turn it into an asset that they can tap into and mine for information.”

CommVault’s view on Big Data is, “when you’ve got a backup copy and archive, let’s not lose sight of having a business value there. Since we understand where that data is, what it created it, how do we turn it into an asset through APIs and interfaces and mine it.” Although people don’t think of backup data as Big Data the company strives to  show its potential by making it accessible.

“Stop creating silos and copies of the data,” West advised. “Our approach, our premise is start with a single platform, make efficient copies that are de-duplicated.”

Watch the full interview below:

Where open source, automation fit in

Asked to comment on the concepts of openness and new platforms, West said that the software-defined data center implies “an intelligent set of software based solutions that create efficiencies.” CommValut uses a set of software based data management tools that allow customers to create API’s to grab backup data. “Openness is allowing APIs to access our content store. We’ve created a set of tools that allow users and partners that tap into the data store.”

As the amount and complexity of data grow, Dave Vellante asked how close the industry was to using analytics to automate policy management and decision making. “We believe that’s where the market is going,” West said. CommVault’s contribution to that is a very sophisticated policy engine. “Based on rules and policies that the customer creates, we are able to go in and make things happen.”

The company has been on a great revenue track, due to its holistic data management approach. It will continue to focus on going from “your backup and archive being an afterthought, back-end process, to opening up this repository and creating a business asset.” CommVault will drive more users and partnerships to tap into that data.