Commvault believes that India is a key market where resides a lot of business opportunity. Commvault is a leading provider of data protection and information management solutions, helping companies worldwide activate their data to drive more value and business insight and to transform modern data environments. With solutions and services delivered directly and through a worldwide network of partners and service providers, Commvault solutions comprise one of the industry's leading portfolios in data protection and recovery, cloud, virtualization, archive, file sync and share. To get more insights, TheDataDriver.com had a quality time with Ramesh Mamgain, Area Vice President - India & SAARC at Commvault. Ramesh divulged about the company's India strategy and long term goals.
What Is Commvault's India strategy?
Commvault considers India as a strategic and long-term growth market. We are investing in India from a team expansion perspective, into research and development talent to ensure our product roadmap reflects the needs of the region, and into our partner ecosystem. While we have had a presence in India for some time, we have powered forward over the past year by injecting greater engineering talent alongside a strong sales organization.
Our strategy is underpinned by three areas of growth.
-We are deepening our channel partnerships, allowing us to increase our breadth in the India market
-We are strengthening our integration into partners, providing more opportunity for our partners and alliances offer a complete solution to customers
-We are offering enterprise grade solutions to our larger national and regional customers, ensuring the expertise they gain access to is allowing them to maximise their investment.
What's the size of the data protection market in India?
Rough estimates indicate India TAM for Commvault is about $USD75M and the outlook is positive. Gartner’s latest 2015 survey on the IT market in India found that 74 percent of CIOs expect an increase in their IT budget next year, with an indication of 11.7 percent growth - the highest in the world. And with 82 percent of CIOs in India agreeing that embracing digital is the next big step forward, there is a burgeoning opportunity for data protection solutions to allow companies to remove the risks yet remain agile in making the most of the opportunities in digital.
What are the market trends you are betting big on?
CIOs are increasingly coming to us to help them understand what data makes sense in the public cloud versus private cloud versus on-prem. They are looking for insight into how they can easily and securely move their data as required across the different platforms, ensuring they maximise the agility and flexibility of the cloud, while retaining control over sensitive information on-premise. This is driving an uptake in Hybrid cloud models, and we are increasingly leading these conversations with customers as they seek the ability to manage the movement of their information from a single console in a secure and efficient way.
India is currently the third largest mobile phone market in the world, with IDC expecting us to overtake the United States by 2017 as the second largest smartphone market globally. While this presents a huge amount of opportunity for eTailers and Digital India, IT teams are struggling to maintain control of information and processes as we move to BYOD, open sharing sites like DropBox and remote working cultures. CIOs are looking for better ways to track and manage information in the mobile workforce, including cloud utilization as well as enable secure and easy file sharing for better collaboration among teams.
Managed Service Providers are a key growth market for us in India. There’s a huge amount of interest in Backup-as-a-Service and DR-as-as-Service as it offers an easy entry into the cloud for organizations of all sizes, while reducing cost and IT burden.
With increasingly stringent legal, regulatory, compliance and investigation requirements, we are also seeing EDiscovery become a critical part of information strategy in businesses in India. APAC is also the fastest growing region in eDiscovery uptake (May 2015, GIA), particularly as Digital India comes of age and continues to fuel data growth, and organizations look to drive value and insight from their information.
What are the new capabilities Commvault is working on?
Our new V11 has recently been launched, and is redefining data protection by moving away from the traditional backup window model, towards managing live copies of data. It’s about enabling a more open approach. The open architecture supports APIs throughout the stack and ensures copies of data are readily accessible in their native format. What’s different is that we are allowing customers to access native copies of data without needing to wait for a restore from a backup repository.
The new platform provides rapid recovery points from the Commvault repository in the format requested by the application. A copy of data from the content store can be managed through the application requesting the data. This enables faster restores, and shifts the idea of data protection from static copies available if something goes wrong, to active copies that can be used for applications such as test/development, disaster recovery or analytics.
The open API architecture lets third-party software partners and customers write applications directly to the Commvault Data platform, so data can be accessed in its standard format. Partners and customers can also build custom workflows for their applications.
What are the problem areas these capabilities promise to address?
CIOs are today faced with applications that are proliferating and creating copies of data at an escalating rate, and they are struggling to stay in control. This is what we’ve recognised and why we’ve created a platform that is open, flexible and redefines how CIOs are looking at their data protection and management. Searching across all data instantly is also a major demand from CIOs as their information spreads across multiple applications including the cloud.
Another cloud enhancement is disaster recovery orchestration to make it easier to implement and test cloud DR. The more touchpoints to data, the more value it brings to the organisation. Disaster recovery in the cloud is a natural extension for this, moving away from running a backup app in the cloud to using it for a failover or secondary copy.
Essentially customers need to be able to understand what data they have, where it is, where it moves and how they can drive value from it. The idea of backup is no longer enough - CIOs are demanding the ability to get access to data as fast and possible, and while they might not have to restore data, they are certainly looking to mine it.
Can you name a few customers?
We have a rapidly growing customer base in India with some of our customers including Greenply Industries, Indus Towers, Symphony Teleca, Olam, Timken, IDFC Bank. Some of our other major customers from across APAC include Stock Exchange of Thailand, Takaful Malaysia, Australian Treasury, Guangfa Bank, Taiwan Carrefour and Hongyuan Securities.