After several quarters of declining revenue due to slowing demand for its legacy products, data protection and management software company Commvault Systems Inc. has made a series of changes to resume growth. One is to further encourage subscription licensing to meet a growing demand from businesses.

“We’ve had subscription licensing as an option for a few years now, but it’s really just been an option — and now we’re going to be more aggressive in terms of how we’re offering that,” said Tom Broderick (pictured), vice president of strategy and chief of staff at Commvault. “It’s going to help [customers] buy what they need, rather than be forced to make some sort of massive upfront perpetual license decision.”

Broderick spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as part of the Commvault FutureReady 2020 Digital Experience. They discussed Commvault’s pricing policy, the company’s goal to simplify the customer experience, and how these measures can boost its business. (* Disclosure below.)

Strategy is to simplify the user experience

Commvault’s new pricing policy is part of its strategy to simplify both the user experience and the commercial experience, according to Broderick. “Customers are demanding this more than ever right now, [and] obviously this goes back to the new world that we’re living in [with the COVID-19],” he said.

To make licensing simpler, Commvault is aligning it to the workload being either protected or managed. “For instance, if it’s a virtual machine workload, the licensing is by virtual machine. If it’s mailbox oriented, it’s by user,” Broderick explained. “It’s aligned to the workload and the procurement methodology that organizations are used to buying for that particular workload.”

In addition to simplifying the process, Commvault wants to make costs more predictable for customers, which is particularly important now due to the financial difficulties imposed on companies by the pandemic. “As organizations think about their workloads, they don’t have to do math derivatives to figure out what their cost is going to be,” Broderick pointed out.

With this strategy and a new portfolio approach announced this week, Commvault aims to attract businesses to bring even more data to its environment, consuming other types of data management capabilities.

“We want to make sure that we’re being aggressive and flexible in how we’re providing these options to customers,” Broderick stated. “Commvault is going to have aggressive pricing for that particular use case … and we’re incentivizing and making it worth customers’ while to really look at all the different offerings that we have.”

It is in these changes that the company has been working hard in recent months. “This, frankly, is a big part of what we’ve changed in the last 18 months,” he said. “It’s hard to get an organization to be aligned end to end and even harder when you think about all the downstream effects of that … sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Commvault FutureReady 2020 Digital Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Commvault FutureReady 2020 Digital Experience. 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