Last October, Commvault introduced its Metallic software as a service (SaaS) backup and recovery solutions for the midmarket in the U.S. About six weeks ago, the service came to Canada, and at the company’s FutureReady virtual conference this week, it provided an update on its evolution.
Metallic has three offerings: Metallic Core Backup and Recovery to protect physical and virtual servers, both on-prem and in the cloud, Metallic Office 365 Backup and Recovery, to protect data in Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Metallic Endpoint Backup and Recovery, which automatically backs up desktops and laptops, providing document encryption, remote wipe, and other security functionality. All are built on Commvault’s core technology.
“We are very pleased with the traction that we’re seeing,” said Janet Giesen, vice president Metallic operations and go-to-market programs. “We’re very pleased with our Canada launch. We had some great partners involved in that launch: Compugen, Insight Canada, CDW Canada, and others that are onboarding. We’re acquiring customers at a consistent rate, and the endpoint offer that we’re doing with Microsoft has hundreds of companies signing up.”
However, the brand’s focus has changed slightly in the nine months since launch. While in the beginning it was firmly aimed at the midmarket, Giesen said that they’d seen much more interest than anticipated from enterprises, so have now shifted Metallic’s vision to one of providing the simplest cloud-first SaaS solutions for intelligent data management to companies of all sizes.
At the end of June, Commvault announced a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to tightly integrate go-to-market, engineering and sales of the Metallic SaaS data protection portfolio with Microsoft Azure, building on Commvault’s longstanding use of Azure technologies. It includes plans to build a SaaS offering of Metallic Cloud Storage on Azure Blob Storage and create other deep product integrations with native Azure services. As part of the agreement, Metallic is now a featured app in the Azure Marketplace.
Giesen said that the deal includes extensive sales and go to market initiatives, including demand generation, joint selling to marquee customers, and partner programs around attach motions and seeding programs for Metallic.
It also includes the endpoint offering she mentioned that is seeing major success.
“It is free endpoint backup, for up to 1000 endpoints per customer with unlimited Azure storage through September 1,” she said. “So essentially, by September 1, we will have been offering this to customers free for five months, with no strings attached, and no requirements to sign up for anything else. This is really about how we can partner to meet customers and communities where they are in a crisis.”
In addition, the Office 365 backup, a featured app in the Azure Marketplace, is offering one month free to customers.
“But it does have a partner-friendly model,” she added. “So if partners want to get involved – we are very channel-focused – there are a couple of different ways that they can take part in the marketplace transaction itself. So we really wanted this to be something that our resellers and our channel partners embraced, and that we could partner with them on.”
And she said partners are embracing Metallic, looking for information on the further international expansion (Australia and New Zealand are scheduled for this quarter, with a phased rollout in EMEA following), and asking about more partner models.
“In terms of partner models, I think there’s been a lot of interest in what we’re doing on Azure Marketplace, and how we’re thinking about other marketplaces in the future, as well as how we engage with MSPs and CSPs,” she said. “Because we launched more as a solution provider focused model, more of a resell and adding services on your own and not an integrated resell. So there are things that we’re exploring on our roadmap to expand in different ways.”
“Watch this space. We have more coming. We’re just not ready to announce quite yet.”
