Commvault's long-term commitment to the APAC channel

Commvault is continuing to expand its presence into the Asia Pacific market, focusing not just on its customer commitment, but also resellers, distributors and partners in the region.

Amongst Commvault's 950 partners in the APAC market are the likes of Avnet (AUS), Dimension Data (APAC), Distribution Central (AUS), Thomas Dureya (Aus) Ingram Micro (IN), Daou Technology (KR), NetApp (APAC), Hitachi Data Systems (APAC) and Networld (JP).

Owen Taranuik, Commvault Theatre vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, says that the company has been focused on building out the company for the anticipated growth he sees in the region.

The company is now more 'functionally rich', in terms of local support and delivery, partnerships and alliances, as well as its distribution and reseller base.

"There's a lot of new emerging partnerships - cloud service providers, to new entrants to the hardware market. So we've added an awful lot over the past twelve months," he says.

"We're trying to get a lot more capability at ground level in the disparate geographies we have in the region."

He says the company's regionalisation means less dependence on global headquarters for resources. The company's efforts have been well-received by partners and customers across the board.

The company has formed an executive briefing centre in Sydney. The centre is a large-scale facility for partners and customers. Commvault can engage with them about the right reference architectures and deployable solutions, training and roadmap visioning and much more.

This is in addition to the APAC-wide 'indirect function', which Taranuik says is "Much more about developing those relationships, enablement of skills, enablement of services capability, enablement of understanding around the complex architectures and solutions that we have".

Working with Commvault's alliance partners, distribution and resale partners, cloud service partnerships and MSI, organisations have no shortage of resources and services.

"Additionally there's a move towards managed servicing and hybrid options and we've been building out that capability in the region as well," he says.

Commenting on Commvault New Zealand's decision to use NEXTGEN as its sole New Zealand provider, Taranuik didn't go into specifics but stressed that the company was looking for long-term relationships.

"We're creating a very focused route to market. We're engaging with partners that are willing to invest with us, to double-down on skills, knowledge and capabilities that best serve the customer in their environment. My view and that of Commvault is rather than a shotgun approach, we would much prefer deeper, longer-term relationships that benefit the customer."

"It's about identifying those people who are in it for the long haul, willing to step up and be very focused about these types of solutions and offerings. We certainly don't want to be an item on a list for someone to tick off."

While the APAC region isn't much different to its global counterparts in adopting Commvault technology, Taranuik comments that there are certainly large enterprises that are experience massive growth.

"I think what I'd say with New Zealand and Australia is they - at an APAC level - are countries that represent the leading edge of what we do. They're very sophisticated, very mature markets in terms of business and IT."

"What we're doing in New Zealand right now, and if you see the rapid migration of governmental organisations into cloud and managed services model, that's probably ahead of many other parts of the world."

Taranuik says that partners like AWS, Azure, Telstra are building the infrastructure that will continue to progress organisations to the cloud.

"A lot of what we're building with executive briefing centres and new partnerships are putting us in a prime position to be able to offer the very best cloud and hybrid solutions to those organisations now that they're moving."

Taranuik says that scalability and growing out the APAC region, particularly in Japan and India will be a huge focus in Commvault's future.

He also says that product engineering is a huge focus from a language and functional perspective, particularly in China due to its firewall and product and service ecosystem and India with its language requirements.

"We are continuing to double down on the customer service level growth, rather than being a sales and marketing organisation. We're bringing the best of what we have globally into the local market for the long term."

"We're 20 years old, we've been on the NASDAQ 10 years already. We take a much longer view than some other organisations which are taking maybe a one or two year view. We're building out the sustained, long-term relationship with those enterprise organisations."