 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Go 19 from Colorado this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are excited to welcome a couple of new guests to theCUBE, one of them brand new to Commvault. We have Mercer Rowe, VP of Global Channels and Alliance's Mercer. Welcome to Commvault and theCUBE. Thanks so much. And we've got Carmen, Saris, the third, pinky out, GTM, Chief of Staff for Commvault. You're the veteran here, you've been there for a year. A year, yes. Exactly, guys, so much excitement in the last, you know, nine months since Sanjay Merchantani took over, analysts saying, hey Commvault, you've got to upgrade your sales, you've got to upgrade your marketing, you've got to shift gears and expand the market share. And we're seeing a lot of movement in all three of those directions. The channel is really critical for Commvault Mercer. It's responsible for a significant portion of revenue. You guys have made some strategic changes there with respect to channels and alliances. First of all, before we get into that, you're brand new, brand brand new to Commvault. Right, right. What attracted you to this company? That's 20 years old that as Sanjay was telling us, it's like the new Commvault. So if I look back at my career in the last 10 years or so, I've been in IT for about 20 years, for the last 10 years or so, I've been a part of launching cloud businesses for a number of, I've been coming at some new vendors, such as VMware, IBM, SoftBank and others. And a lot of that in that process, what I've been working on is helping existing customers to move their workloads into the cloud. We know that the market is evolving to a hybrid cloud type of deployment model. I mean, we can see that across the board with the way our customers are behaving, with the way that the cloud vendors are behaving. But that's been a challenge because of the technology matching. Figuring out how to, essentially put the same technology stack in the cloud as you do on-prem to be able to move those apps over. I really started to look for companies that could bridge that gap and it could really operate in a hybrid cloud scenario. Commvault is absolutely positioned perfectly for that in my mind. And so it's such an opportunity as we shift from our kind of act one, as a great data protection company, to a true hybrid cloud data platform or data plane. Yeah. Carmen, maybe give us a little bit of your insight as to some of those changing roles as Mercer was just saying, right, cloud is having a huge impact. We've watched for years the shifting role of the traditional VAR or SI or the like. So bring us a little bit insight as to what today is important to your go-to-market. Yeah, so what's important to our partners, especially the VARs, is continuing to be relevant with our customers, right? Change is the only constant and the rate of change is just accelerating. So partners are looking for vendor partners like us to help them be relevant, to come out with the solutions that are going to be more relevant even tomorrow. And from a Commvault perspective, if you think about everything we've done from a data backup and data management perspective, we've been the best in the industry as we've just seen with Gartner and Forrester, right? So we're proud of that. But what our partners we're looking for is where are we taking this next? Where's the innovation going to come from? So when you weave in things like Metallic that now gives our partners a consumption option. So if they have customers that want to buy software as a service, they now have that option. And then when you add software defined storage, it takes us into a completely different area and you had asked Stuart about the cloud. When you think of cloud native applications and you think of containerization, that's changing the way backup data and primary storage data is being managed. The lines are blurring. Now with HeadVig software defined storage, we have an opportunity to come out with integrated offers to help our partners be even more successful. So from a go-to-market perspective, in the last year there's been a lot of transformation. Not just in terms of leadership changes, but this big focus on ensuring that as customers environments change in this hybrid multi-cloud world that they are living in, whether it's by design or it's by acquisition or different types of growth, right? Talk to us a little bit about how Commvault foundationally is set up to really make some big shifts and big bets in new routes to market. Yeah, I can take that from where we were a year ago till now and then feel free to expand. So when you look at, we've always been a partner business, a partner-friendly business. A significant percentage of our revenue, like north of 90%, goes through our partners. What our partners were asking for is, hey, you guys are partner-friendly, but we need you to be partner-driven. So when you come up with solutions, make sure they're channel-ready, make sure they're partner-ready. Make sure we have our eyes on the market so that we're not just trying to sell software to our partners, we need to better understand their go-to-market models. How can we help them grow their business by offering a variety of different services? So I think the evolution you've seen is a year ago, the company made significant investments on becoming partner-first. So we've invested in channel leadership, partner leadership, not only at the corporate level, but also in the field. And since Sanjay came on board, as you referenced in February, that change is just continuing. So we're making our next level of investment in channel executives, in executives' period, who have context about what channel is. And when you've lived in the channel, you've dealt with channel conflict, you bring that to the table, you bring that experience to the table. So I think you're seeing an evolution of us in our next phase of investments, helping our partners be successful and becoming partner-first. And we've done a lot of new things with our programs that I can get into, financial incentives, rebates, making it easier on our partner portal to interface with us, and we're going to continue to do that so that we're not only just the right product choice, we're the right financial choice for our partners going forward. And I think to add to that, if you look at our metallic launch, obviously the reason we work with partners is in service of our customers. That's the whole reason we partners because we want to create a better value proposition for our customers. And when we launched that product, in fact some of it a little tidbit, we did a lot of, the company did a lot of research, went out and talked to non-not current Commvault customers, so potentially new Greenfield customers, and consistently got the feedback that they wanted to buy softwares of service applications like that through a partner because they could have a conversation about their entire IT environment. So it's really exciting to be in a spot where we are not only partner-first, partner-led, but we're in a position where we know that this is the way our customers want to interact with us. That's number one. Number two is as we start to make some of these transitions into SaaS, as we move into adjacencies like we're doing with Hedvig, it's so important to have our partners be the tip of the spear to help our customers through that journey. Innovation is great, but innovation also creates complexity. That's where partners help us move our customers through that journey and be successful. We were talking to one of your launch partners earlier today and they were very excited about Metallic. On the same high, they did recognize that there is a significant change as to how they have to engage, what part of the organization, it's a good thing they have a Microsoft practice that this plugs into for the O365. So bring us a little bit as to how you're helping the channel transform. Oh absolutely, so as you can see, a lot of the partners, you can see a lot of them that are here today have moved from being pure, say they're in the solution provider space, just to use as an example, have moved from being pure solution providers to also having MSP offerings or other kind of services offerings because they realize that customers want the flexibility of consumption economics while also being able to work with their trusted partner. So whether it's them, whether it's service providers who we want to drive into more of an as a service model and obviously we're planning to release all of this technology to our service providers to allow them to offer Commvault-based or Commvault-powered services in the market or whether it's our great alliance partners, companies like NetApp and Hitachi, where we have OEM relationships or other kind of very, very deep, collaborative relationships in the market, adding some of these features and functions and capabilities as we move, as we help our customers to move into the cloud, as we help them to give them more options for these multi-cloud or hybrid deployment models, this opens up additional apertures, additional opportunities for services, for holistic end-to-end solutions from these partners that actually increase their ability to be relevant with the customers, but also the share wallet. I want to get your perspective, Mercer, on differentiation because partners, your partners work with a lot of your competitors. We know there's a lot of co-operation in technology, but what is it about some of the things that Commvault is putting in place or some ideas that you have to really differentiate how you're enabling partners, whether it's, we're talking about a VAR or a DISTY or all the way up to a global services systems integrator that can deliver massive enterprise scale. I could start with that, if you're okay. So, it's all about listening to partners, right? Listening to what they need and what they're asking you for because many times a vendor becomes vendor arrogant, right? You're not listening to the partners. So our partners have been clear. They said, we want a predictable financial model with Commvault, which translates to a program that's a full-year program that gives them financial incentives so they don't have to guess what we're going to do in any given month or any given quarter with some kind of spiff. So we've delivered on that. They've asked number two, they said, they've said to me over there, and you're going to be hearing this, is you've always had great products. Please, that has to continue. That's like a ticket for entry. And we've seen that we continue to lead in that space. And then I mentioned earlier about innovation. They want to know that we're going to take them into the future. So those three things are really critical for our partners. And then the last thing they ask for, which is basically a foundation across that, is field engagement. We need to be more tightly engaged with your sellers so that we go in on joint sales calls, that we're bringing each other opportunities. And I think with the new sales leadership we have, Ricardo de Blasio, our new CRO, our boss, knows full well how to grow businesses with partners and through partners, and it's by engaging in the field. And that's why we're going to have more people in the field so that we can engage with partners and create opportunities together. So those are kind of the four foundational elements that we see. Yep. I was wondering if I could get your viewpoint just in general about the channel. There was a lot of fear for a number of years about the cloud coming in and that readjustment. How do you think it's going? What's the general feel of the channel today and how their interaction is with that ever-changing interaction with the big public clouds? It's a great question. I remember when we were first launching the cloud business at VMware, I used to go to, I built our channel model, but I would introduce myself in the partner meetings with, hey, I'm from VMware cloud, we're here to kill your business. Because there was a fear. And that fear, I think, in a certain way, has kind of dissipated as the market has realized as partners and most probably customers have realized that there is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. The cloud is not the solution to all IT needs. It is certainly an important part of most customer strategy. In fact, I don't think that there are many customers that don't have cloud as a part of their overall IT strategy. However, it's not the entire environment and it certainly doesn't solve all needs. So, from a general perspective, the savvy partners have embraced the cloud, they've embraced services, and they've looked at it as a holistic part of how they do business with their end customers. Because as we think about, to the last question, as we think about partner profitability, I think about it in two main vectors. There's margin, field engagement, revenue, and so forth, which is very, this is the financial element of working with a partner like Commvault to make money. And that's obviously a very important part and that's something we will continue to invest in, programs and so forth to support our partners to be profitable working with Commvault. But the other is in the practices, in how they build services and how they build end-to-end solutions, another tidbit on Metallic that some people picked up on was that we've released the telemetry APIs, meaning that partners who are working with Metallic can see exactly what their customers are using. How are they growing? Oh, they all of a sudden backed up a new workload. Hey, maybe they have a new project, maybe I should call them. So I'm not waiting until renewals, I'm not waiting until these sort of forcing events to have an opportunity to place a call into my customer and say, hey, I noticed you're doing something new. How can I help? That insight, and sorry Carmen, we were talking about that a little bit earlier, I think with maybe with Rob Kailusti and that was really interesting because it really, it changes the word partner, right? It can, because if they're actually able to follow along and maybe even make some educated predictions or suggestions to the customer, then the customer feels like, okay, you're not only selling me this, you're actively helping me optimize my deployment, learn from it and plan for what's next. So that definition of partner changes for the better. And I think the whole SaaS model is like the next step beyond cloud. So sir, you asked me about cloud. Very briefly, the way I've seen it over the last, probably seven to nine years is I had billion dollar vars tell me nine years ago, don't ever try to come in here and sell me a multi-tenant cloud service because I'm selling hardware. That moved to, hey, you know what? We see the customers changing. I was with a service provider, why don't you come help us? And then a couple of years later, they said, you know what? We're kind of building our own service now. So we don't need your services anymore. So in a few, you know, three to five years, they went from stay out, I'm never going to sell a multi-tenant service to quickly, well maybe not so quickly, some not as quick as others, realize that they have to get there. I think SaaS is like the next step beyond that. Well, in this business, I think if that teaches anybody anything, it's never say never, right? Yes, that's right. Guys, thank you so much for joining Stu and me, sharing with us how things are really transforming here, but also what you're doing for global alliances and channel to really catalyze Commvault's business. We appreciate it and we say best of luck in as you enter week three or day three. Day three, day three. One of those things. Gentlemen, thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.