CXO of the week: Anshuman Rai, Area Vice President, India, and South Asia, Commvault

Commvault liberates business and IT professionals to do amazing things with their data by ensuring the fundamental integrity of their business. Its Intelligent Data Services Platform empowers these professionals to store, protect, optimize, and use their data, wherever it lives. Delivering the ultimate in simplicity and flexibility to customers, its Intelligent Data Services Platform is available as a software subscription, an integrated appliance, partner-managed, and software as a service- a critical differentiator in the market. For 25 years, more than 100,000 organizations have relied on Commvault, and today, Metallic is accelerating customer adoption to modernize their environments as they look to SaaS for the future. 

In a recent chat with Anshuman Rai, Area Vice President, India, and South Asia, Commvault, he talks about the Indian tech industry and what Commvault has been up to.

Introduction

We live in the golden age of data that enables enterprises to glean insights and make smarter business decisions. According to IDC, global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% over the 2020-2025 forecast period. Owing to this problem of data deluge, effective management has become imperative to unlock data’s true worth.

Commvault empowers businesses to do amazing things with data. We proactively simplify and intelligently manage the complexity of enterprise data, uncover insights, accelerate growth, and help ensure the fundamental integrity of any business. With technology excellence at our core, we continue to lead the market with our Intelligent Data Services Platform.

With the broadest portfolio in the industry, we leverage technology to drive data insights that can be applied to data protection, cloud, and on-prem storage, and anomaly detection to mitigate ransomware.

Our 25-year rich legacy helps us identify our customer requirements and we recognize that customers need flexibility and choice. As we go into 2022 and beyond, we will continue to expand our full set of data management offerings across (Metallic SaaS protection) and Commvault, in line with the growing needs of enterprises and cloud-delivered data management and protection.

Please give an overview of Commvault’s focus area and achievements in 2022?

Data is at the core of all business operations, especially in this transformative digital era. It has become the crown jewel that must be protected, yet always accessible. Aiming to be a future-ready organization, we anticipate the rising demand for data management solutions and thus, our portfolio resonates with customers and partners alike.

2022 has been a great year for Commvault-reporting its best-ever quarterly and full-year results.

This growth came from the rising popularity and adoption of SaaS globally, including in India.  In fact, India’s SaaS industry is on a bull- run and is set to clock in $100 billion in revenues by 2026, as per the Chiratae-Zinnov India SaaS report. Commvault’s success story traces the same route as we registered heavy traction for Metallic, our backup-as-a-service platform.

We are additionally witnessing a strong demand for flexibility and agility as customers want a choice between on-premises, cloud, or a managed DMaaS deployment model. Owing to the enormous popularity of the SaaS landscape in the intelligent data services industry, we aim to continue to capitalize on it, expand across the IT services industry, and much more in 2022.

What, as per you, are the five important things that Commvault should be looking at today?

Commvault strives to drive innovation to deliver the industry's best technology for data needs and focus on value creation through more inclusive practices for employees and partners. We prioritize five critical drivers that help us, and our customers achieve success-and we are well-positioned to have all of them:

Closing Business Integrity gap: There are more than 100,000 organizations relying on Commvault technology to unify multiple generations of data to mitigate the impact of data sprawl and rapidly recover data in a cost-effective manner, ensuring business continuity.  We aim to future-proof the diverse mix of data workloads and environments for businesses at scale with the simplicity of a unified customer experience.

Constant Innovation: Commvault’s entire community of trailblazers has been at the forefront of innovation in our rich 25-year history to recognize and meet customers’ growing and evolving data environments. The future has never been brighter, and the opportunity has never been greater in the data services sector. We consider it essential to tap into innovative thinking to compress and minimize the cost, footprint, and complexity of managing the dynamic workforce, data, and operations.

Execute Effectively: We are at an inflection point largely focused on the inside-out progress of the company. We operate on a concrete action plan to transform organisation’s information management goals - a well-thought-out strategy to gain a competitive edge through effective data management and big data. To deliver success across these critical drivers, we work towards strengthening the company from within to uphold and celebrate our culture.

Keeping Company Culture Alive: We are highly driven by our core values-Connect, Inspire, Care and Deliver— for our customers, partners, and most importantly, each other. At the center of our culture are our amazing Vaulters- building, supporting, and delivering our industry-leading solutions to market while driving our company forward in who we are and how we operate. Their critical thinking is crucial for creating an environment of learning, relearning & unlearning.

Inclusion and Diversity: At Commvault, we are committed to fostering an environment that celebrates differences and ensures we all feel included and supported. Our commitment is executed by a three-pronged approach to Diversity and Inclusion: Workplace Inclusion, Workforce Diversity, and Personal Accountability. In addition, our Employee Resource Group (ERG) operating model ensures cross-cultural learning, mentoring, and relationship-building across employees.

How has Covid-19 accelerated the transition to digital for the IT industry? What will be the new normal in the IT industry?

The pandemic era taught IT leaders to work smarter in order to do more with fewer resources. More organizations are moving toward a hybrid cloud environment during their digital transformation journey to reduce footprint and costs. Part of this digitalization has been cloud transformation- to seamlessly move data and workloads across every type of infrastructure, both on-premises and cloud to meet the business requirements

As business environments constantly change and grow, new platforms, systems, and architectures will increase the sophistication and complexity of IT departments. Going ahead, IT advancements will drive a renewed focus on security with every single company, irrespective of its size and location. Every organization would benefit from the automation of IT tasks and a successful hybrid cloud journey paired with a modern data protection strategy will help unlock value for businesses.

What changes is Commvault bringing to the IT industry?

Digitalization has transformed the IT workload landscape by providing business leaders with the ability to innovate at speed even during a pandemic. However, the surge in remote workers has resulted in a multi-generational data sprawl of organizational data making it difficult for organizations to manage and secure it efficiently.

Commvault recognized the strain on IT departments to support business growth and manage the complex data environment at the same time. To tackle this, the solution portfolio of Commvault enables greater efficiency by adapting to the data management needs through a future-proof Intelligent Data Services Platform across hybrid clouds, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments.

Commvault has helped see enterprises see data as an asset, not a liability, and extract value out of it and unlock its potential to drive business growth. With our service portfolio ranging from data

security, compliance to data transformation, and data insights, we effectively overcome existential data threats and the challenges they pose and meet digital transformation objectives.

How will work-from-home lead to a paradigm shift in the IT industry?

As we come out of isolation and brush off pandemic blues, it is obvious that hybrid work is here to stay. In a remote work scenario, businesses need careful evaluation of their cyber threat landscape and as a result, data protection and governance have taken a more strategic place, becoming a boardroom priority.

The rapid adoption of SaaS-based solutions will continue to help businesses respond quickly to work-from-home guidance. However, despite the general security of applications, end-users of SaaS solutions now need to be ever more vigilant and follow IT and security best practices.

Additionally, businesses will have to find a way to balance the remote and in-person workforce and make them feel connected to the company’s vision while meeting employees’ flexibility needs. Commvault envisions a future where technology can support human collaboration and empower enterprises to do critical tasks without hitting a roadblock.