Commvault Metallic with Microsoft Azure – from seismic to tectonic

When the elephant rumbles in the jungle, the whole village takes notice. That was what happened 2 weeks ago when Commvault® announced their multi-year agreement to place Metallic™ into deeper integration with Microsoft® Azure. This strategic partnership will consummate several key areas between the 2 companies, which are Engineering, Go To Market (GTM) and Sales.

The “low hanging fruit” move is of course the tight(er) integration with Microsoft® Azure Blob Storage but the more exciting anticipation is “What else is next“.

Metallic – A Commvault venture

Cloud First, Cloud Next, Cloud Big

The Metallic™ SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering isn’t new. It was unveiled as a Commvault® venture at Commvault® GO 2019, but it was only open to the US market then. Earlier last month, Commvault® switched on Metallic™ for the Canadian market, and it is inevitable that Metallic™ is coming to a region near you and I. ANZ is next, according to the grapevine, followed by Europe.

An O’Reilly® Media Cloud Adoption survey in January and February 2020 (just before the COVID-19 pandemic) revealed that 25% of the respondents “said that their companies plan to move all of their applications to a cloud context in the next year“. This is no coincidence. It is now Cloud First; Cloud Next; Cloud Big.

And this opportunity became significantly real when Commvault®, the largest data management company in the world, and market leader dived all in into the clouds while the rest of the enterprise vendors of the same technology category have been pussyfooting for some years now. This shows the company’s bold strategy and commitment to be there of where the customers are going in the next few years. That boldness started with the appointment of new CEO Sanjay Mirchandani in early 2019.

Birth of Metallic at Commvault GO 2019

When I was invited to be Commvault® Social Media Ambassador more than 3 years ago, I knew Commvault® was on the cusp of big changes, which I blogged about here. At Commvault® GO 2019, I could feel little sparks of fires being lit at the conference. The energy and the buzz engaging with the Commvault® folks in Denver, CO were exhilarating. The coming together of several key factors lighted up the conference, just 2 months after Commvault® acquired Hedvig.

Metallic™ was launched at Commvault® GO 2019, and it was labelled “A Commvault® Venture”. This gave Metallic™ a startup feel and the spring it needed to be nimble and light. It was a seismic move.

Microsoft Azure backups with Commvault Metallic

Metallic™ is offered 3 ways, as pointed below. But with the deeper engineering and integration efforts, Metallic™ will surely extend its prowess to more Azure applications and beyond.

• Core Backup and Recovery
• Office 365
• Endpoint Backup and Recovery

And it is available in the Microsoft® Azure Marketplace. New Metallic™ General Manager, Manoj Nair, blogged about it here.

• Also check out Manoj Nair’s interview with Tech.Unplugged 2 weeks ago.

Metallic in Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Upcoming challengers

Cloud native backup is a healthy and vibrant market. Early challengers like Druva, and Clumio are already marking their territories and claiming them. Druva announced a 70% year-on-year growth on recurring revenues just 2 weeks ago, while Clumio is inching towards with US 1 billion valuation status after closing USD 135 million Series C funding back in November 2019. And just last week, another cloud native backup startup for backing up Salesforce.com, OwnBackup, just got funded with USD 50 million.

And there is whole slew of cloud native applications such as NoSQL databases, Kubernetes and containers, edge computing all calling out for data protection.

These positive announcements have validated the native cloud backup market, and Metallic™ is poised very assuredly. Bear in mind that Commvault® has not even begun to put their Complete™ Backup and Recovery and Activate™ technology, and even the Hedvig software-defined storage into the ring yet. The thought of these “weapons” in the Commvault® arsenal is earth shattering.  When that happens, it will be tectonic.

More than you think

This Commvault® Metallic™ + Microsoft® Azure partnership definitely has more than meets the eye. It is not the usual run-of-the-mill partnership. The 3 key areas I highlighted earlier,

• Engineering
• Go To Market (GTM)
• Sales

creates an ecosystem of innovation to purpose build the Metallic™ integration deeper than any vendor has so far with Microsoft® Azure applications. Office 365 and Sharepoint are the obvious ones, but Microsoft® has so many applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory all waiting to be part of that engineering development between 2 companies. This in turn leads to Go To Market (GTM) solutions which are better crafted for a frictionless experience, a more solid Customer Experience (CX).

Lastly, this partnership is incentivizing the sales organizations of both companies. Once the processes have been ironed out, this juggernaut sales army could drive immense business revenues. The possibilities of what this partnership could become are mind boggling.

As an industry observer and occasional pundit, this partnership cannot be more exciting for me.