Though Commvault has yet to establish a strong hold on the Indian market that is already dominated by strong players, the company is steadily executing its channel expansion plans and is confident that within a year it will be able attain a stable position

How do you see yourself positioned in the Indian market?
In India, we started our business in 2004 with the opening of our research and development center in Hyderabad.

Today we cover three centers for sales operation-Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi-where we have placed our supportive pre-sales team. We have three categories of partners that include Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hitachi Data Systems and EMC as the OEM partner; Inflow Technologies as the distributor and third category is of base resellers. Our resellers execute business through OEM partner or distributor but we maintain a direct relation with them as well.

What are your marketing strategies for India?
Our product suite is a strong tool for us to promote Commvault among the end- customers. We reach customers only through our channel, and the after-sales support and services is provided either through the channel or us. However, we do not intend to take away the service providing opportunities from channel. We have got our team in India who provide support to the partners in building the customer base. Also, we try to maintain a difference in technology and sales operation.

Our go-to-market strategy will remain the same. We will promote our channel to add value to the service they provide to the end-customers so that the service level is consistently enhanced. If required, we also give additional service to the partners. We may talk directly to customer but we do not sell directly. We can go for business dialogues directly with the end-customer but the solution will be deployed only through channel.

What are your plans for channel expansion?
We are always open for new partnership but are very selective in adding new partners. Our intention is not to saturate the market by appointing large number of partners but we aim at providing business opportunities for the existing partners. We haven't set any target figure for adding the number of partners. Depending on the space we will continue adding more partners.

It is very easy to appoint four to five distributors and saturate the space. I don't think this would be beneficial for existing distributors. We will hire more partners only where we find a gap. We may appoint vertical-oriented partners who have attained specialization in particular segment-be it finance, telecom or banking. However, we believe that while appointing new partners, we would be reducing the business opportunities for the existing ones.

While selecting the new channel, we look for skilled business partners who have reasonable business presence. Their selection may depend on the geographical locations where we do not have partners.

How do you position Commvault in a market where players like Symantec are already dominating?
We approach customers with our competitive products that are different from those of other players. In order to make our customers understand the value of the product, we have to make sure that the right message is conveyed to them consistently.

Customer has to buy only one solution for archival, data security data and information management and back up. We have one package that is equipped with all the solutions unlike our competitor where each product has to be purchased separately.

AMRITA TEJASVI
amritat@cybermedia.co.in

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