How a channel launch can and should be done

Dale Vile suggests channel players could take some cues from cloud vendor CommVault's Poland launch this week

Nowadays, I try to keep my international business travel to minimum – after a few hundred thousand miles in the air earlier in my career, I now appreciate a less hectic existence. I therefore thought twice when I was invited to Warsaw to sit in on CommVault's launch event to mark its formal entry into the Polish marketplace.

Then I cast my mind back to the buzz and excitement of setting up new markets for software companies back in the 90s, and thought it would be good to experience that pioneering spirit again. I wasn't disappointed – it was an extremely informative and enjoyable day.

In case you are unfamiliar with CommVault, or if it has been a while since you have looked at the company, this highly interesting player is concerned with helping organisations protect and manage information in a more joined-up, effective and efficient manner.

It's a simple aim but an important one; our research at Freeform Dynamics has told us time and time again that a lot of information-related costs, risks and frustrations can be tracked to a combination of data fragmentation and disjointed data management tools.

CommVault addresses these problems by providing a single platform known as Simpana, which hosts specific functions that would historically have been implemented as discrete "point solutions". Included here are things such as backup and recovery, archiving and discovery, snapshotting and replication.

The nice thing about Simpana is that all the functions work together within a consistent technical architecture, policy framework and management environment.

Simpana is also extremely inclusive in terms of sources and destinations. You can pull data out of pretty much any mainstream storage array, snapshot any VMware or Hyper-V based virtual landscape, and even harvest data from user desktops and laptops. You can then direct the output (whether backup or archive) to any combination of flash, disk or tape devices.

Clever indexing along the way means you end up with a kind of virtual repository, which might be based on a complex, distributed or tiered, storage landscape. To users, this gives the appearance of all their stuff being held in one place. They can then get to backup or archive data by searching via a browser interface or mobile app.

The principle behind this last piece is similar to the concept of online interactive archives I discussed in a previous post. The difference is that the control layer for the virtual repository is typically run on your own infrastructure rather than in the cloud.

The result is the same, though, in that data you would normally expect to be inaccessible using traditional data protection tools and techniques is transformed into a usable set of information assets that can be used to deliver incremental business value.

There is more detail on the CommVault website. You can also look at the technical wizardry used to achieve some pretty dramatic performance and efficiency improvements compared to traditional tools which, I'll be honest, I only partially understand (though I do work with Freeform colleague Tony Lock, who knows about such things and assures me it's all real)!

Back to Poland: CommVault has not been totally absent from the territory. It has done business there through local relationships with the likes of HDS, Fujitsu, Dell and NetApp. The launch, however, marks a commitment to invest proactively and develop the market based on a properly structured operational plan and local presence, backed up, of course, by the broader EMEA operation.

Part of the plan is to sign a strategic partnership with a single VAD, and it was interesting to hear Agnieszka May-Sadowska – recruited in April to head CommVault's Eastern European business – talk about the qualification process behind this. In her words: "We need a partner who buys into our vision, and is willing to work with us on educating resellers and the market in general on the value of our approach versus point solutions that have dominated this part of the industry so far."

This makes sense, as with the right channel it should be possible to drive initial business by addressing specific customer pain points, then develop accounts by cross-selling other Simpana capability. There is also an obvious up-sell through elevating the conversation with customers to consider data protection and management in the broader sense.

We were told expect a distribution announcement in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, a local partner that has already been signed is Wasko, a heavyweight integrator with significant resources and a strong track record of solving "big" problems across a number of key industry sectors. Andre Kubatsky, a senior manager at Wasko, presented at the event.

Kubatsky highlighted two important reasons for investing in the CommVault relationship. The first was the leading-edge nature of Simpana (given credence by Gartner, though the Tony Lock endorsement carries more weight with me), and the second was the proactive, organised and committed way in which CommVault approached the partnership discussions and subsequent business development and support activity.

Given all the stories we hear from channel players about the opportunistic and short-term approach taken by some vendors, this was encouraging to hear, as was May-Sadowska's robust responses to questions about why CommVault is not putting efforts into activities other than those in the plan.

The message was that no one who wants to work with CommVault in the region will be ignored, but you can only be proactive in a finite number of areas at once, and if you try to do too much, you will not do anything particularly well.

I wish all business development and channel management people in the IT industry had that same level of clarity about what it takes to build a truly sustainable indirect business.

The takeaway from all this for those in the channel is to press any new vendor really hard on its strategy, plan and how it intends to focus its resources before joining its partner programme.

Obvious, perhaps, but with some vendors still playing the numbers game when it comes to channel development, and partners still frequently falling victim to conflicts created by shotgun tactics, perhaps a little reminder is in order.

Dale Vile is research director and chief executive of Freeform Dynamics