Commvault products rollout promised throughout 2017
Following a quarter of solid revenue growth to end 2016, Commvault Systems Inc. plans a string of product enhancements throughout 2017. The additions are designed to improve Commvault’s performance in the cloud, and with software-defined storage and business analytics.
Commvault Wednesday reported $167.8 million in revenue last quarter, a 7% increase from last year. Software revenue of $77.3 million increased 8% year over year, while service revenues of $88.5 million increased 5%. Commvault broke even for the quarter following two straight quarters of losses.
During the earnings call Wednesday, CEO Bob Hammer laid out plans for a Commvault products rollout that will culminate in the Commvault GO 2017 user conference in November.
Hammer said the company plans to add capabilities for business analytics, search and business process automation as part of its strategy to become a full-scale data management player for on-premises and in the cloud deployments.
“Next month, we will further enhance our offerings with new solutions with industry-leading Web-based UIs and enhanced automation to make it easy for customers to extend data services across the enterprise Commvault solutions,” Hammer said of the Commvault products roadmap. “[We will deliver] some of the key enhancements tied to the journey to the cloud and converged data management.”
The enhancements include new data and application migration capabilities for Oracle applications and the Oracle cloud, big data, fast data and SAP Hana. Commvault already supports Hadoop, Greenplum and IBM’s General Parallel File System.
Products for the AWS cloud
Commvault will also add tools for migrating and cloning data resources to the cloud. These include automated orchestration of compute and storage services for disaster recovery, quality assurance, development and testing, optimizing cloud protection, and recovery offerings inside and across clouds to secure data against ransomware risks.
Earlier this week, Commvault added optimized cloud reference architectures for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will make it easier for customers to implement comprehensive data protection and management in the AWS cloud.
Commvault customers will have the ability to direct data storage to specific AWS services — such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access and Amazon Glacier for cold storage.
Hammer said the amount of data stored using the Commvault software within public environments increased by 250% during 2016.
“When you look at our internal numbers, in both cases, we’ve had strong pull from both AWS and Microsoft Azure,” Hammer said. “The pull from AWS has been stronger, so there’s a higher percentage of customers’ data in AWS, but I will also say that we are gaining a lot of momentum and traction with Microsoft and Azure.”
Hammer said Commvault continues to make progress on its software-defined data service offerings that are in early release.
“More and more of our customers are replacing or planning to replace their current IT infrastructure, with low-cost, flexible, scalable infrastructures, similar to those found in the public cloud,” he said.
“Our teams have been hard at work to embed those cloud-like capabilities directly into the Commvault data platform, so we can ensure the delivery of a new class of active, copy management and direct data usage services across an infrastructure built with low-cost, scale-out hardware,” Hammer said.
Other upgrades to Commvault products include new and enhanced enterprise search, files sync-and-share collaboration, cloud-based email and endpoint protection during the middle of 2017.
Growth dependent on new products
Commvault has been working to dig itself out of a sales slump that began in 2014. Hammer said the company still faces some critical challenges, and continued growth depends on its ability to win more large deals. A lot of its success will turn on releases of new Commvault products.
“Our ability to achieve our growth objectives is dependent on a steady flow of $500,000 and $1-million-plus deals,” he said. “These deals have quarterly revenue and earnings risk due to their complexity and timing. Even with large funnels, large deal closure rates may remain lumpy. In order to achieve our earnings objectives, we need to prudently control expenses in the near-term without jeopardizing our ability to achieve our software growth objectives for our critical technology innovation objectives.”
Commvault added 600 new customers during the quarter, bringing its total customer base to 240,000. Revenue from enterprise deals, defined at sales of more than $100,000 in software, represented 57% of the total software revenue and the number of enterprise deals increased by 22% year-over-year.