CommVault, a data protection and management vendor, today announced the release of its Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription based offering designed for SMBs and enterprises. It’s a solution which CommVault spokespeople say will help channel partners better differentiate themselves in the industry.
Mark Rytwinski, Canadian manager for technical and professional services at CommVault, said channel partners are an important part of CommVault’s overall go-to-market strategy because, he says over 77 per cent of its sales are driven through the channel each year. This, he adds, is a percentage that is quickly growing year over year.
Robert Brower, director of Worldwide Professional Services at CommVault, says with the new Web-based and integrated monitoring support service rolling out, businesses can take advantage of the real-time reporting and monitoring capabilities that ROMS offers. The solution is licensed on a per server basis. Brower also says there’s no limit to how many users can use ROMS once the application suite is licensed.
Both Brower and Rytwinski are hopeful that with today’s release, CommVault will be able to further expand its customer reach and partner base with a new and unique product offering.
“ROMS is a single application layer that provides backup, archive and replication capabilities,” Brower said. “Error information is also sent in real-time to CommVault support for necessary review and action. What’s great about ROMS is that it also provides customers with overnight, weekend and holiday monitoring.”
For those partners who require training, Brower says Web-based training is provided and the company is currently working on making face-to-face training sessions available as well.
“We look for partners who have a storage focus, technical expertise, and also for partners with one or more relationships with strategic partners (some of which include), NetApp, HP and Data Domain,” Brower said. “There’s no limit to how many resellers we add. We will add a reseller if they match our criteria.”
Brower says CommVault also offers partners a 15 per cent discount on the solution.
“We didn’t make ROMS to be a get-rich-quick type of product,” Brower said. “We wanted it to be a differentiator in the market because it can be used as a mechanism where partners can sell more software on top of it and at the same time they can still preserve their margins that way,” he added.
Through its Canadian distribution partnership with Arrow, the Oceanport, N.J.-based vendor also has a presence in Canada with about 12 channel partners in the country. CommVault also has a main Canadian office in Ottawa, in addition to other offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.
Currently, the company has over 160 partners that make up its channel community in North America, Rytwinski said.
“We keep our channel community relatively small,” Rytwinski said. “But we’re signing up new partners on a quarterly basis.”
