CommVault leans hard on channels

New regional alliances manager hints at revamped programme

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Friday, 02 September 2011
Data management and protection vendor CommVault is expected to announce a revamped partner programme soon.

Details of the programme were not ready at the time of this writing, but according to Harvey Sanchez, CommVault’s director of channel alliances and cloud in APAC and Japan, the scope of the new programme will include its reseller channel, OEM partnerships, managed service providers and cloud providers.

“It is very exciting for us because it is getting that focus back onto the channel and building value and creating great connnections with our partners because there’s no way we can manage it all ourselves,” he says.

With only three permanent staff and two contract workers in New Zealand, CommVault has traditionally leaned on resellers to implement its backup and storage solutions. The vendor can tap an additional six or seven “virtual staff” for support, working out of Australia, but in New Zealand, partners do about 80 percent of the work on a project.

“The largest single implementation was done through our partners,” Sanchez told Reseller News during an interview at Microsoft’s TechEd event on August 24. CommVault was a Major Sponsor of the event. “We did pieces and we did work with them from a services point of view. But the technology lead was provided by them, and lots of the hands-on was provided by them and that’s the way we roll typically, and that won’t change.”

Sanchez, whose appointment was announced on August 17, will be responsible for building CommVault’s channel and alliances, especially looking at the way CommVault works in the cloud. The company is developing at least part of its channel with Ingram Micro.

“It’s more about improving CommVault to the channel,” Sanchez said. “I have to say New Zealand is probably one of our best practice regions in regard to the channel. Simon [Probert, CommVault’s New Zealand country manager] has been around for a few years and he knows that to be successful in New Zealand you need the channel with you.”

CommVault’s existing tiered programme, PartnerAdvantage, includes resellers, OEMs and service providers. The company currently has three global OEM partners that operate across ANZ: Dell, HDS and NetApp.

Sanchez says CommVault is “investing a lot” to make sure the partners have the training and “enablement” to talk effectively to customers about its solutions.

CommVault intends to build partnerships with companies aligned with the vendor’s “priorities”, taking on as many resellers as it can manage with its small team. The vendor is considering what Sanchez refers to as “incubation partners”.

“These are not necessarily big players, but the niche players, the ones that are very specialised,” he says. “A key area for us is to identify who those guys are and how we can work with them to use CommVault as a value prop.”

But, Sanchez says that he and Probert have not been shy to turn away resellers where there isn’t a good fit.

“It comes down to, we have three [full-time] people, so how can we manage those guys effectively without over-committing and under-delivering,” Sanchez says. “We want to over-deliver and under-commit and that challenge has been for a lot of vendors.”

Sanchez emphasises CommVault’s hardware independence and flexibility which allows customers to manage and use cloud services as just another storage “target”, in addition to local data centres and disk arrays.

Sanchez came to CommVault from Microsoft where he worked for about 20 years. Most recently, Sanchez served as marketing director for Microsoft Australia, according to the CommVault website.

“I never, from a personal development perspective, wanted to go to Singapore or Seattle,” he says. “There is so much you can do at a subsidiary level and I wanted to look at what else I wanted to do with my career here....I wanted to find an organisation that had that growth factor to it. There’s nothing better than selling best of breed technology and being in an environment that’s culturally and dynamically exciting and that was very coincidental that CommVault came around.”