From an analyst’s perspective in the technology industry, a good rule of thumb is always to be skating to where the puck is going. That can often be easier said than done, though companies can make an effort to do so by listening to customers, partners and experts.

Commvault Systems Inc., under Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mirchandani (pictured, left), incorporates this forward-thinking approach in its products, notably with the launch of Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI.

“We started by calling it a solution, but it’s much more than that,” he said. “It’s a platform, because it allows partners to collaborate. It allows us to really deliver mission-critical capabilities that haven’t been. It’s a unified interface not having to do artificial separation of SaaS versus software. It’s extensible with APIs; it’s got AI wired right through it. So, it’s an amazing new platform.”

Mirchandani and Rajiv Kottomtharayil (middle) spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay (right) during a recent conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the announcement of Commvault Cloud and outlined how the new platform is intended to offer a unified interface integrating both software and software as a service. (* Disclosure below.)

Three major factors

The technology industry isn’t very far removed from October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which focuses on being prepared for cyberattacks. When it comes to preparedness, companies are delivering a consistent message, according to Kottomtharayil.

“How do I, as a backup administrator, exercise my recovery strategy to ensure that when the business comes to me to recover, how do we automatically do that?” he said. “That was the key pain point that I’ve been hearing from all our customers, and that’s what we try to automate here.”

To do that, one needs the ability to spin up infrastructure on the fly, according to Kottomtharayil. There are three major factors at play here.

“You should be able to use some kind of automation, some kind of intelligence to make sure that you’re bringing up the right set of applications,” he said. “More importantly is predictability. How long will the recovery take? Those are the three major things, and that’s what Commvault Cloud brings together.”

Looking to break the shackles

Mirchandani was previously CIO for a very large tech company, and it wasn’t as if getting access to technology was difficult. But the reality is that when a company grows over a long period of time, various challenges emerge.

“When you’ve acquired 80-odd companies or whatever your format is, every time you make an acquisition, you get a footprint of IT,” Mirchandani said. “Then you have that long tail that you have to deal with. It’s not easy.”

If an organization is trying to restore or test a tabletop exercise or HR application, it needs redundant infrastructure to do that. That’s why this announcement reflects a “revolutionary” way of doing it, according to Mirchandani.

“We’re breaking the shackles that IT has had to deal with, which is, ‘I need infrastructure to be able to tell you if I can recover something,’” he said. “What we’re saying is, why? You’ve got home-ground advantage. Use this, we’ll spin it up. You can test every workload as often as you want, develop your runbooks based on that. And when, god forbid, you’re going to have to call it, you know how to do it.”

One of the most noteworthy topics discussed was the company’s Cleanroom Recovery solution. It’s a feature valuable to backup administrators, according to Kottomtharayil.

“The ability to test my recovery, test my recovery plans, automate it so that it can bring up the applications in the right order and in the right predictable time, every single time — without the need for having infrastructure spun up,” he said.

Another key announcement involved the use of artificial intelligence to be able to automate some of that capability. They also discussed the use of AI to make life as a backup administrator easy.

“The operational automation, the ability to do root cause analysis and solve those problems — those were some of the key things in my head as key functionality,” Kottomtharayil said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview:

(* Disclosure: Commvault Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Commvault nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE