‘We’re seeing the fruits of our labour’: Commvault VP of channel sales EMEAI on growth strategy

Jamie Farrelly discusses partner programme, acquisition strategy and “production readiness”

Building on two recent acquisitions, data platform vendor Commvault is ramping up its channel efforts while trying to help partners navigate the shift to services.

Jamie Farrelly, Commvault’s VP of channel sales EMEAI, updates CRN on the vendor’s channel strategy and refocus over the past three years.

Farrelly says that the company’s goal is to achieve what he refers to as “continuous business.”

“If I cut that down, it’s around cyber resilience and specifically the test recovery and rebuild of a production environment back to production readiness after an attack.”

“A number of the technology developments we've made, whether through acquisitions or organically, have been around being able to focus on an organisation's desire and ability to test the recovery strategy based on a breach.”

“It’s not a matter of ‘if it happens’, but of ‘when it happens’.”

Farrelly also talks about the concept of ‘cloud rewind’, which focuses on cloud native applications, and aims to drastically reduce recovery time after a breach.

“Even if an organisation is able to recover your data, it will take between six and eight weeks to rebuild the applications that were corrupted or had to be turned off.

“With our technology, this recovery happens in minutes or hours.”

Farrelly joined the vendor in 2021, as VP of EMEA channels and alliances, as he was “enticed over because there was a huge focus on building out the SaaS and ARR capability.”

According to him, the MSP business in EMEA needed crucial investment to grow.

“It was a lot of work that required a real build and focus to lead us to a point where we're now seeing the fruits of our labour.”

The MSP transition

Farrelly says Commvault’s partners include MSPs and VARs, but the line between these two is now getting blurry.

“What we call our traditional VAR channel has expanded, acquired, doubled down on services, and started accessing the MSP market.

“If you take Bytes, Logicalis and Softcat in the UK, or even Bechtle in Germany, all of these organisations have an as a service model, as well as a resale model.

“Around 60 per cent of our business is within that kind of MSP / VAR model, 20 per cent consists of ‘pure’ MSPs, and the rest will be through our alliance partners and our GSI model.”

Acquisitions, revenue and funds

Commvault recently broadened its portfolio and influence through the buyouts of Appranix and Clumio this year.

“The acquisition of Appranix has made our quick applications recovery possible, while Clumio has helped us work and align to AWS.

Farrelly says the acquisitions played an important part in accelerating the company’s growth, even though the vendor still prioritises internal development and the evolution of its organic portfolio.

“We're always evolving,” says Farrelly.

“Our acquisitions are made to further our go-to-market credibility and stability.

Credibility and stability are key for the channel-focused vendor, as its partner programme is also its current “profitability mechanism.”

“It's not the only one, but it's a big lever for growth.” Farrelly clarifies.

Taking about Commvault’s market development funds (MDF), Farrelly says that partners’ revenue isn’t the company’s end goal.

“We've moved away from bland targets for partners.

“We don't see revenue targets as effective, because we want to focus on customer value.

“We're much more focused on how we deliver value, rather than just trying to drive top line revenue.

“In terms of MDF specifically, we are very targeted on our most focused partners, because they're more capable and committed to driving more customer value with us.

“But we're focusing down on really enabling and activating both our partners and our customers, rather than just looking at lead generation all the time.”