When technology companies change leadership, the shift in corporate direction can mirror transformation taking place within the industry itself.

For some analysts who are paid to observe companies in specific market segments, the change in the top leadership earlier this year at Commvault Systems Inc., with the hire of former Puppet chief executive officer Sanjay Mirchandani, speaks volumes about the significant role of enterprise data.

“Data is at the heart of what companies are doing,” said Archana Venkatraman (pictured), research manager of storage and data center at IDC Research Inc. “We keep talking about speed of development and speed of applications, but I think it’s time we started talking about speed of intelligence and speed of insights, because that’s what’s going to give companies a competitive difference. That’s what Sanjay has brought in the last nine months.”

Venkatraman spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Commvault GO event in Aurora, Colorado. They discussed the significance of Commvault’s Metallic announcement and transformation taking place in the storage market (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Cloudlike scalability

Capturing the interest of Venkatraman and a number of industry researchers at Commvault GO this week was the announcement of Metallic, a new venture focused on a software-as-a-service offering to provide data protection for midmarket customers.

“With this initiative, they’ve done some clever things and brought agility and scale together,” Venkatraman said. “They’re entering the SaaS world, and they’re talking that cloudlike scalability. They’re talking the cloud language, and it’s going to propel them a long way.”

During one of the event’s keynote sessions, Mirchandani spoke of a need to rethink the lines between primary and secondary storage. Was Commvault’s CEO echoing what data storage customers may be thinking as well?

“That view is quite aligned with what I see when I talk to customers,” Venkatraman said. “The lines between primary storage and secondary storage are blurring. You need to invest in storage technologies and make data tiering in such a way that when cold data suddenly becomes warm or hot data, you have access to it instantly in the format that you like.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Commvault GO event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Commvault GO event. Neither Commvault Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE