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.

Dell's Quest

Friday, July 06, 2012

quest/kwest/ (noun): A long or arduous search for something.

This week's news confirmed the widely speculated rumor that Dell's quest for Quest is nearly over. First of all, congratulations to Vinny Smith and his team for outstanding execution and maximizing shareholder value. Well done and well deserved.

Quest brings to Dell a portfolio of tools with a strong emphasis on Identity and Access Management, Performance Monitoring, Windows Server Management and Database Management. As one of the largest (if not THE largest) OEMs for Microsoft, Dell should be in strong position to wrap Quest tools around their Microsoft portfolio. They say the deal is expected to close in Dell's fiscal Q3, which should be perfectly timed to the upcoming, and much anticipated, release of Windows 2012.

It's no secret that Dell is a large reseller channel for CommVault and over the many years of our partnership, Dell's storage team led by Darren Thomas has made very wise decisions building out its storage portfolio with a combination of acquisitions, organic R&D and partnerships. Along the way, CommVault has plugged Simpana software into Dell's products including Compellent, EqualLogic and PowerVault solutions to help Dell deliver on a continuum of price and performance as Jeff Echols discussed during his recent live interview from last month's Dell Storage Forum conference in Boston. As a result, thousands of enterprise customers have benefited.

So, when I look past the headlines, I like the opportunity ahead for CommVault. I've been fielding a lot of questions on what the Quest and AppAssure acquisitions mean to CommVault. The short and simple answer is: not as much as you might think. We just don't play in the same market segment and there's little to no product overlap. Even after the acquisition closes, I expect that enterprises are more likely to consider CommVault whereas small organizations may look at AppAssure and Quest.

Why? Let me come at this from three vantage points.

1. Backup is (finally) dead. Data protection is not about backup today, it's about a holistic approach that tightly incorporates snapshot management, archive, reporting, deduplication, replication, search and access. Why is that important? Modern data and information management has evolved far beyond traditional backup products to provide a complete view into data across applications, devices, operating systems and locations. Your data becomes a protected, well-managed, easily accessible information asset that delivers real value back to your business.
   
   CommVault is the world's fastest growing data storage software company because we enable our enterprise customers to look beyond backup and realize the economic and operational value of a truly integrated, singular approach to protection, archive, search and access. Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant on enterprise backup/recovery software is an example of how CommVault is setting the pace for modern data management.


2. Innovation and integration ain't easy. It's hard work innovating and it takes more than just saying you'll "sell a suite" or "integrate tools" with existing products. Providing protection, management and access to data everywhere — across hardware platforms, in any physical or virtual environment — is difficult and complex requiring a scalable architecture, lots of product testing, performance tuning and application integration. Especially in the enterprise. CommVault has always taken an organic approach to technology innovation. Our Simpana software is built on a philosophy and architectural foundation, called Solving Forward, where a singular approach is the most efficient and effective way to manage, protect, archive and access exploding corporate data assets now and in the future.
   
   Let's talk integration for a minute. Enterprise customers shouldn't have to worry about managing a number of point products or be concerned their data management solution won't work with the technologies already in place in their data centers — CommVault will and we're laser focused on innovating Simpana data and information software to meet the needs of our enterprise customers now and in the future. A perfect case in point is that we've integrated Simpana software to manage snapshots with all the leading hardware arrays in the industry including Dell, EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp.


3. Hetero-everything and everywhere. I don't know of a single mid-market or enterprise organization that doesn't have multi-vendor operating systems, multi-vendor storage and multiple applications. Today's IT demands a robust and scalable data and information management solution that lays across the entire enterprise (to be very specific: datacenter, remote office, laptop, mobile and cloud) with deep integration throughout the stack (stack=applications, OS, VM, array, tape, cloud). Companies simply can't provide access to the business or their end users when they don't have all their data assets under management. I believe Simpana software is the only solution that can accomplish this from the edge to deep in the data center, across all OSes and environments.

This is the value Dell finds with CommVault in the enterprise and why we continue to be excited about our partnership. CommVault is going to continue to focus on the enterprise. We're taking market share and we're going to win. And, we're looking forward to working with Dell and all of our partners as we together solve our customers' data management pain points.

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