Commvault to boost AWS capabilities with $47m Clumio deal

The deal “advances our recovery offerings, strengthens our platform, and reinforces our position as a leading SaaS provider for cyber resilience,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault CEO

Hybrid cloud cyber resilience vendor Commvault plans to buy AWS-focused Clumio for about $47m (£35.125m) - a fraction of the $261m Clumio has raised since its founding in 2017.

New Jersey-based Commvault expects to close the deal in early October with immediate accretion to annual recurring revenue (ARR) and revenue, plus free cash flow accretion within the next three quarters, according to a statement.

Commvault disclosed the purchase price in a regulatory filing, but said that it funded the deal with cash on hand and called the amount “not material to Commvault.”

The vendor also maintains the second fiscal quarter earnings guidance it gave in July.

Commvault to buy Clumio

Alan Atkinson, Commvault’s chief partner officer, told CRN US that the Clumio acquisition means “empowering our partners to deliver even greater value to their customers by combining Commvault’s breadth of solutions with Clumio’s deep expertise in AWS environments.”

“This means enhanced opportunities for partners to support critical cloud data and workloads, including AWS S3 and Amazon DynamoDB, while maintaining and growing their existing Clumio relationships,” Atkinson said.

Atkinson declined to comment on the purchase price, but he did say the deal “makes strong strategic sense for Commvault and our partners on a number of levels.”

He also said that Clumio founders Poojan Kumar and Woon Jung are joining Commvault.

“Commvault provides more breadth of data protection offerings across more workloads than any other vendor,” Atkinson said.

“That’s critical when it comes to cyber resilience. We also provide incredible scale globally. Clumio provides depth of data protection offerings for AWS, which is very important as more customers are storing AI data in workloads like Amazon S3.”

Commvault has about 7,000 channel partners worldwide and receives about 90 per cent of overall sales through indirect channel and alliance relationships, according to CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.

"Combining Commvault's industry-leading cyber resilience capabilities with Clumio's exceptional talent, technology, and AWS expertise advances our recovery offerings, strengthens our platform, and reinforces our position as a leading SaaS provider for cyber resilience," said Sanjay Mirchandani (pictured), CEO of Commvault.

"Joining hands with Commvault allows us to get our cloud-native offerings to AWS customers on a global scale,” said Kumar, co-founder, chairman and former CEO of Clumio.

Kumar stepped down as CEO in June. He co-founded Clumio in 2017.

Kumar was succeeded by Clumio CCO Rick Underwood, who was not quoted in the press release announcing the Commvault deal.

Before joining Clumio in November, Underwood served as CRO of BigPanda for more than a year and worked at Snowflake for about four years, leaving in 2022 with the title of VP of sales for major accounts in the West.

CRN has reached out to Underwood and Kumar for comment.

When Kumar spoke to CRN in February about the latest funding round, he said the company was focused on growth and not yet profitable or cash flow positive.

Clumio said at the time of the Series D round closure that it had grown ARR fourfold in 2023.

Market research firm PitchBook reported Clumio’s valuation after its $75m fundraise in February as around $157m.

The Clumio deal comes on the heels of Commvault’s acquisition of cloud cyber resilience technology provider Appranix.

During Commvault’s quarterly earnings call in July, the vendor’s CEO said that Commvault Cloud had been made available on the AWS marketplace for US federal government users.

In August, Commvault said it had expanded its cyber and data security ecosystem with strategic integrations with partners including Google Cloud, Splunk and Wiz.

In July, the vendor unveiled a Microsoft 365 Backup Storage integrated component of Commvault cloud backup and recovery for Microsoft 365.

Revenues and finance

Commvault reported total revenues of $224.7m for the first fiscal quarter ended June 30, an increase of 13 per cent year-on-year.

The vendor saw total ARR of $803m, up 17 per cent year-on-year, and operating cash flow of $44.7m, according to a statement from the time.

Commvault told investors to expect second fiscal quarter total revenues of between $218m and $222m, an operating margin between 19 per cent and 20 per cent not using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).

For the fiscal year, Commvault said at the time to expect total revenues between $915m and $925m, total ARR to grow 15 per cent year-on-year, non-GAAP operating margin between 20 per cent and 21 per cent and free cash flow of at least $200m.