Greg White is a Senior Manager of Product Marketing, focusing on Data Management and Protection. He has worked in in the technology industry in brand and product marketing for the last decade helping organizations of all sizes, verticals and geographies solve their IT challenges. Over the last six years, Greg has gained specific knowledge and experience in the enterprise application and storage areas where he has helped businesses find solutions for their data growth, data management, and data protection problems.

Jeff Dorr is a Senior Manager currently focused on data protection product marketing for CommVault. Over the past 10 years, Jeff has led efforts in several companies to develop, introduce, and manage market leading hardware, software, and services that really help users improve their data protection environment.

Simpana Software: Helping Put CommVault Customers "In the Zone"

Monday, April 30, 2012

Guest post by Jeff Dorr

CommVault recently held its global sales kickoff event in Orlando with the overall theme being "In the Zone." It was great to see co-workers, sales makers, customers, partners and analysts face-to-face. It was also good to hear them share their experiences from today's rapidly shifting IT playing field. And just like the theme to the event, I came away with the sense that enterprises the world over can get "In the Zone" with a modern approach to data and information management. Let me share a few of my experiences and you can judge for yourself.

First off, I heard Rachel Dines, Forrester analyst and "foodie" (check out both blogs), talk in detail about the data protection challenges she hears about regularly from enterprises: mobile, big data, and cloud/ virtual servers. Then Gartner analysts Dave Russell and Sheila Childs followed with a discussion about market trends and opportunities for "back-ive." That's the mash-up term that our COO, Al Bunte uses for the combined backup and archive market space. My take away from the analysts is that a truly unified solution like Simpana 9 and its OnePass feature for integrated, rapid back-ive of big file environments can meet a huge customer need. For instance, Simpana OnePass provides backup, archive and reporting in a single operation that is easy on resources while reducing time, cost and the risk of managing rapidly growing data across multiple sources such as desktops, laptops and public and private clouds, just to name a few. As their data grows exponentially, customers will require sophisticated solutions that can scale with them yet are easy to manage due to their constrained resources.

We gained additional insight from a customer panel that included a global entertainment company, a global financial services company, and a world-class cloud and hosting provider. Our cloud customer described having to backup 42 petabytes in one month and 2.3 million backup jobs with 1,500 restores. Talk about Big Data! Each indicated that they continually look for improvements in data center operations which leads them to review data management strategies regularly. My takeaway is that successful solution providers in this space must listen closely to their customers and offer solutions that help them deliver real value back to the business or risk becoming irrelevant.

The event also included insights from our business partners. In fact, CommVault honored a number of partners in a variety of categories with its first annual worldwide PartnerAdvantage^TM Awards program. These partners distinguished themselves by combining Simpana software with their expertise in data and information management to put customers "In the Zone." My take away is that the "back-ive" market is in the midst of dramatic change and that companies must step-up their game to meet those challenges.

This blog is just a highlight reel of a much larger, more comprehensive event. I encourage you to check out CommVault's other social media outlets for different perspectives and more details. We just posted a new video to our YouTube channel called "CommVault Simpana Software: Singular Data and Information Management." Give it a view and you're bound to understand how Simpana software helps put CommVault customers "In the Zone." Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and join our PartnerAdvantage group on LinkedIn.

Jeff Dorr is Senior Product Marketing Manager for Modern Data Protection at CommVault.

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