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.

Making it to the Big Leagues

Thursday, November 12, 2009

We play close attention to perception. The labels that industry watchers use to describe us mean a lot. So it was important recently when an industry analyst stated how CommVault has "made itself into a Tier 1 vendor." It was significant because until now, we've been referred to as an "emerging" company.

It also was significant that CommVault landed on Goldman Sachs' coveted list of big-league players cited in a recent IT spending survey. CommVault ranked No. 5 on a list of the top 10 software providers gaining a share of limited IT spending dollars. Yep, we followed virtualization leaders VMware, Citrix and Red Hat while outpacing several other big names in software, including Salesforce.com, Cisco, Adobe and Oracle.

It's great to make it into the software big leagues, especially at a time when CIOs have lots of choices and fewer dollars to spend. As a result, they're making tough choices while struggling to lower costs and increase operational efficiencies. So, making it onto the "share gainer" list is rewarding–and somewhat surprising.

Don't get me wrong, we work really hard to add value to our customers' businesses and we believe we're the best at providing a singular platform for managing data. But, we also recognize there are much bigger players out there, not necessarily with better solutions but with longer histories, well-established customers and deeper pockets. And yet, CIOs picked us over them because they understand what we're trying to do. In fact, nearly all the top players on this big-league list have a strong story to tell when it comes to demonstrating solid economic benefits.

CommVault resides at the apex of a massive convergence that's taking place in data centers around the world as organizations seek new ways to reduce costs by redesigning their IT infrastructures and embracing new cloud and virtualization strategies. In his Open Road post on the IT spending survey, Matt Asay acknowledged the top 10 players for scoring highly with CIOs, calling them "cloud arms dealers." From our perspective, virtualization and cloud strategies are both driving major infrastructure redesigns, which is the perfect time for improving data management.

How you move, manage and protect data is as important as securing sufficient power to run data centers. We came to that realization more than a decade ago, which is why CommVault has remained focused on developing a next-generation data management framework to support today's evolving data centers, without undue cost, complexity or risk.

It's rewarding to know that savvy CIOs understand our value proposition and most likely plan to increase their adoption of the CommVault Simpana platform in the year ahead. It's great to be recognized for innovation. What's equally telling is the absence of our core competitors from the top 10 "share gainer" list. In my humble opinion, many of our top rivals missed a major technology turn while acquiring as many new companies as possible to extend their product arsenals. In doing so, they lost the ability to adapt quickly to changing customer needs, including the demand for integrated solutions that can be managed easily and scaled seamlessly.

There are countless examples of what happens when companies don't stay ahead of the technology curve. The recent state of affairs at Brocade, for example, is a hard lesson in how a few missed technology turns erodes market leadership to the point where selling the company is the only viable option for survival. And, as reported in eWeek's Channel Insider, a long list of potential suitors, including Cisco, IBM, Oracle, HP and Dell, are lining up to consume what's left and make it their own.

Fortunately for CommVault as well as our customers and partners, innovation is part of the company's heritage and culture–it's what continually sets us apart from the legacy software vendors and has helped us land a spot on the coveted Goldman Sachs top 10 IT spending list. While we're pinching ourselves about this move to the big leagues, we're not losing sight of what we still need to do—stay focused on meeting the needs of approximately 11,000 CommVault customers who've been rooting for us all along.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is innovation to you? I'm curious to see where it ranks, so let me know what you think.

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