Commvault Systems Inc. may have made significant changes in its executive ranks since 2018, but the company hasn’t lost its institutional memory.

Although Commvault’s longtime Chief Executive Officer Bob Hammer stepped away in March, the man who served with him as chief operating officer for 20 years has remained on the company’s board. Al Bunte (pictured, right), recalled the early days of his firm.

“If you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. We believed data would grow, and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with,” said Bunte, executive advisor to the CEO at Commvault. “I said: ‘We have to plan for a million x on our solution.’ I was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You had to build something to scale.”

Bunte 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. He was joined by Miranda Foster (pictured, left), vice president of worldwide communications at Commvault, and they discussed Commvault’s legacy of customer support and Bunte’s interest in building a company for the long term (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

High customer satisfaction

As a key data protection solutions provider, Commvault built its reputation through customer support, with a satisfaction rating of 98%, according to information supplied by the company. The firm’s new leadership will be focused on maintaining those customer relationships built over the past two decades.

“The brand that Bob and Al built really embodies the reliability that we give to our customers; that’s what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night,” Foster said. “What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Commvault for translates into what we’re doing with the new Commvault.”

The company’s former COO sees the new executive team as building from the base of technology and customers that Commvault successfully established, with an eye toward the long-term view.

“They’re trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in this company, technology obviously, platform, architecture, our support capabilities,” Bunte said. “We wanted to build a company. We didn’t want to just flip a company, because we thought there was a long-term vision in it.”

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