Flexibility and agility are key attributes of the new digital economy. So when it comes to solutions, customers no longer expect to be tied down to a package that comes with a finite number of solutions — some necessary but others not so important, or even useless dead weight.

“A differentiating factor in our platform is that all the services we are talking about are delivered off of the same software image, same platform, managed through the same [user interface],” said Ranga Rajagopalan (pictured, second from left), vice president of products at Commvault Systems Inc. “It’s very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services.”

Rajagopalan and his Commvault colleagues Don Foster (pictured, second from right), vice president of storage solutions, and Mercer Rowe (pictured, right), vice president of the global partner organization, joined Stu Miniman (pictured, left), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a panel discussion as part of the Commvault FutureReady 2020 Digital Experience. They discussed Commvault’s evolution into a subscription-based, cloud first company, as well as the corresponding changes in the company’s services portfolio. (* Disclosure below.)

Heading toward the goal of unifying data and storage management

Back in early 2019 when Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mirchandani took command, Commvault was already in the middle of its digital transformation. By the end of the year, the company offered software-as-a-service back-up and delivery through its Metallic division and had dropped a cool $225 million to acquire software-defined storage innovator Hedvig Inc.

Hedvig and Metallic have been the fuel propelling a series of new products aimed at data management in a hybrid cloud world.

“Our strategy is cloud-first, and you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio,” Rajagopalan stated. “When you think of it from a hybrid customer’s perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on-prem while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimizations built into that.”

And for customers already in the cloud, the company’s portfolio also targets those “running a SaaS, PaaS, or cloud native … either through SaaS with Metallic or through downloadable software with backup and recovery,” Rajagopalan added.

Partner feedback was also important during the development process, according to Rowe, who lists three specific points he gained from partner conversations.

“One was simplicity and the simplicity of the program and simplicity of understanding rewards, levers, and so forth,” he stated.

The second feedback point partners gave was around paying for value and ensuring they gained profit from benefits, such as deal registration. And third was an emphasis on co-investment: “Making sure that we … support our partners who are investing in practices and other training and other enablement around Commvault,” Rowe said.

Flexibility, simplicity and security

Among the product announcements have been new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and complete data protection, as well as updates to Metallic and the Hedvig distributed storage architecture and platform.

“The reason why we are kind of reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular, use case-aligned data management services is to provide the cloud-like flexibility,” Rajagopalan stated. “Customers don’t have the same data management needs all the time. So they can pick and choose the exact solution they need. And because they’re all delivered on the same platform, they can enable other solutions faster when they need it.”

Taking the spotlight was integrated data protection appliance HyperScale X. By incorporating Hedvig technology into its scale-out data protection solution, Commvault has added simplicity and flexibility to container, virtual and database workload management; optimized scalability across hybrid environments; and added built-in security features, such as ransomware protection and intelligent anomaly detection. 

“Security has always been at the core of what we’re doing with storage,” Foster stated. “It comes down to ensuring that data in rest, data in transit, it’s always secure and it’s also encrypted based upon the level of control that you as an end-user want.”

The pandemic has condensed data center evacuations that would have normally been a five- or 10-year process into an almost instant switch to service provider or cloud environments, according to Rowe.

“We’ve seen this happen overnight as companies have needed to move those IT environments off-site into managed environments,” he said.

Ensuring an end-to-end security posture and protecting applications — whether on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid scenarios — “is something that’s really important to our customers,” Rowe added.

Attempting to manage stateful apps with traditional storage solutions has become a challenge for many companies, according to Foster. Fixing this is the goal of the “really interesting stuff” among the company’s recent announcements, including how Hedvig makes Kubernetes-native integration possible across multicloud and on-prem environments.

“Now managing the stateless and the stateful becomes pretty easy, and pretty easy to maintain,” Foster said.

Commvault holds onto its Gartner crown

Adding to the excitement of the past week at Commvault was the announcement that the company had been named leader in the 2020 Gartner critical capabilities for backup and recovery. This is the ninth consecutive time that Commvault has led the market, and its high scores across public cloud, virtual and physical server environments give validation to the company’s focus on cloud-first.

Gaining 4.4 out 5 stars in peer reviews, Commvault’s solution was called a “feature-rich, Swiss army knife enterprise backup” by one reviewer and “probably the best tool out there for data management and protection” by another.

Looking down the road to the future

The product announcements made during the FutureProof event are a demonstration of Commvault’s commitment to the vision of the unification of data and storage management, according to Foster.

“Whether it’s for Kubernetes, for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, we are quickly working to continue driving that level of unification and integration between the Commvault portfolio and what the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform can also deliver,” Foster said.

“It’s all designed with customer’s simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it’s all delivered on the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single platform,” Rajagopalan concluded.

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