No More Green Fields in Enterprise Backup Software; Interview with CommVault VP Robert Brower (Part I)

The importance that a vendor's professional services and technical support plays in closing deals at the enterprise level can not be underestimated. Every enterprise company knows that installing and managing even the best architected product in the world may not go as smoothly as planned because of the complexities often associated with implementing it in their environment. In fact, it can be argued that the quality of a vendor's professional services and technical support is every bit as important to obtaining and retaining an enterprise company as a client short and long term as the product that the vendor is selling. Nowhere is this becoming more evident than in the rapidly changing enterprise backup software and data management space.

This question of enterprise caliber professional services and technical support is one that CommVault® Systems has addressed as its Simpana® software suite makes inroads into more enterprise accounts. But as it does, CommVault is finding the need to evolve its Professional Services (PS) and Technical Support organizations to support these accounts. To understand how CommVault is doing so, I recently had the opportunity to meet with Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, Americas, to discuss this topic.

Jerome: What are the new challenges that CommVault faces as it provides services and support for today's enterprise organizations?

Robert: In the enterprise backup software space, there are no more green fields left (i.e. - CommVault no longer expects to enter a new account and not find it with one or more versions of enterprise backup software). CommVault has adapted the nature of its Services and Technical Support as to how it approaches global enterprise customers. It needs to help companies transition from their current backup software to CommVault's Simpana suite. To do so requires that client engagements sometimes begin before the customer ever signs on the dotted line.

The Services and Technical Support organization is now brought in early in the sales cycle to help explain to the CIO CommVault's value proposition. To a certain degree, a CIO does not care which backup product his company uses. So explaining how CommVault deploys its Simpana software in the company's environment in a timely manner has become an extraordinarily important part of the sales process.

Jerome: Since CommVault's Professional Services and Technical Support team is involved so early on in the sales process at the customer account, how does that change the customer experience?

Robert: CommVault's PS team's involvement early-on in the sales process gives us an edge when it comes times to deploy the software since we gain needed insight into the customer environment. The PS team documents what the customer requirements are to include what performance levels they expect, how resilient the supporting hardware for the Simpana software needs to be and what the customer's expectations are for problem resolution.

The PS team works with the customer account from build-out to deployment to ongoing management of the software. This becomes very important as the Technical Support team is subsequently brought into contact with the customer. The CommVault PS team shares the history of the customer environment with the Technical Support team to help the customer avoid any long term issues with CommVault. We want to avoid scenarios where we need to drop an engineer off at a customer site and then expect the engineer to fix the customer's problems. By having a history in place, if a CommVault engineer does need to get involved, the engineer already has a sense of what has occurred at that client account and how to best support it.