Commvault's channel boss on slashing its product portfolio and winning the channel over

Commvault ousted its CEO in May and has since undergone a radical refocus

Commvault's channel boss Scott Strubel (pictured) claims its partners are happier than ever after the vendor committed to streamlining its product portfolio and ramp up its channel support operations.

Four months into his role, Strubel claims Commvault has experienced a "historic change" in the back-up and recovery vendor's channel strategy.

"In July, we reduced and simplified our pricing and product structure from over 25 products to basically four products: Commvault Complete, Commvault Hyperscale, Commvault Orchestrate and Commvault Activate," he said.

"This is making it much easier for sales, pre-sales professionals and our partners to talk about, quote and sell our solutions.

He added that he's also launched two reseller support systems: the Partner Success Desk, Commvault's partner portal site which he says has "rapidly improved the support for sales and technical queries"; and the Commvault Quote Centre, which Strubel says provides "immediate assistance on sales needs".

Strubel's comments come a week after Commvault's latest hire, Wenceslao Lada, who was appointed as VP of worldwide alliances.

At the time, Lada remarked that some of the vendor's partners were not entirely satisfied: "Based on direct feedback from partners, Commvault has improved all aspects of partner engagement in an effort to simplify, streamline and scale their business."

However, Strubel insisted that partners are already seeing the benefits of the changes to Commvault's offering.

"I think partners are already rating us higher in the four months I've been here in the area of simplifying how they do business with Commvault."

The vendor's focus on being a more attractive proposition for VARs comes amid a strong field of rivals doing conspicuously well.

Big competitor Rubrik has hit the headlines earlier this year with a series of flashy board appointments, in the form of former Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft chairman John W. Thompson, and announcing it's set for a run-rate of $300m due to the record pace of adoption among large enterprises worldwide.

Meanwhile, Commvault remains without a replacement for CEO Bob Hammer, who was unceremoniously ousted by an activist investor coup in May.

In the meantime, Stubel said his focus remains on how else to simplify Commvault's go to market strategy.

He hinted at more "consolidation and rationalisation in the next couple of months" in the vendor's distribution network.

"We understand that there's a high degree of partner overlap between ourselves and other OEMs like HPE, Cisco, NetApp and Hitachi Vantara…

"I'm making sure it's very neutral from a price and compensation perspective, whether a partner chooses to sell Commvault solutions through another OEM or through Commvault directly."