David West has served as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development since April 2011. Prior to his current role, he served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from September 2005 to March 2011, and as our vice president of business development from August 2000 to September 2005.

Prior to joining our company, Mr. West served as a director of strategic alliances from April 1999 to July 2000 and vice president of storage solutions in July 2000 at Legato Systems, Inc., which was subsequently acquired by EMC Corporation.

Prior to joining Legato Systems, Mr. West served as vice president of sales at Intelliguard Software, Inc., which was also subsequently acquired by EMC Corporation, from 1990 to April 1999.

Mr. West obtained his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University.

Walking the Talk

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Recently, I attended an internal event that celebrated the achievements of CommVault's highly focused engineering team that culminated in a long list of Simpana 8 software innovations. Easily the biggest endeavor in company history, more than 300 engineers around the globe coordinated a Herculean development effort, adding approximately:

• 140 new features,
• 50 additions in platform support,
• 20 architectural enhancements, and
• 150 other enhancements to improve usability, resiliency and scalability.

In applauding their accomplishments, I realized all the hard work and forward-thinking it took over the years to truly change how data gets moved and managed across an enterprise—a feat much easier said than done.

Perhaps that's why Symantec has been talking about unifying its Veritas storage software for years, but has yet to deliver on that overarching vision. When Symantec revealed its "Storage United" foundation in June 2007, the company described how Veritas storage software would unite platforms, administrators and businesses by integrating various data protection technologies under a single management umbrella. Fast forward to this year and they're still talking about it, as recently as this week on their quarterly earnings call. In fact, while a lot of storage software vendors continue to talk about product integration, common management interfaces and consolidated policy structures, I'm continually amused that they have made such little progress on it.

Symantec's new CEO Enrique Salem said a lot of the right things when he spoke to SearchStorage at SNW last month and asked, "Why touch data more than once?" Why indeed? Since day one, it's been our belief that you can slash operational costs and save substantial storage space by leveraging one unified, singular platform for managing backup, recovery, discovery, archive and more. We've invested millions of man hours building a platform from the ground up so data can be managed centrally with a "single pane of glass" view into the entire data management infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Symantec's Salem is still talking about a day when backup, recovery and archive will become features ultimately managed by the same underlying infrastructure and management interface. How far he's looking into the future to finally deliver on that promise is hard to say. All I know is that CommVault consistently "walks the talk" when it comes to carrying out our vision of a singular approach and unified data management.

When we launched Simpana 8 software, leading industry analysts gave us a thumbs-up on our direction. Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, hailed our single platform approach as a "great example of a solution meeting the distributed data demands while reducing operational overhead." Others talked about how certain facets of our approach aid in rapid information discovery and enable companies to align their information management efforts with their business needs without adding complexity.

Starting with the release of CommVault's Galaxy 1.0 software in 2000, we've maintained a laser focus on our unified framework. The same can be said today as we continue to listen closely to our customers' wants and needs, which is why our most recent software release contains close to 300 enhancements to lower data management costs, risks and complications.

Many of our customers and partners already have tipped their hats to our engineers for creating a simple, singular solution for managing ever-increasing amounts of corporate data. Scores of others are taking a closer look at CommVault to alleviate the pain of struggling to get disparate, disjointed products to work together. The stories of those who have already switched to Simpana 8 software are pretty compelling, especially once you calculate how long it might take your current vendor to deliver the unified data management approach you've been waiting for. Is it worth the wait or time to switch? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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