Commvault Shifts to Focus on Continuous Business – Tech Talks Roundtable

Many of us attended the Commvault Shift event, whether live in London, in person or remotely, uh, attending the virtual event this week. And we have some thoughts about modern data protection, uh, the evolution from backup to well continuous business as we heard about at the event and overall where this whole world of cybersecurity and compliance is headed. That's the topic of this Gestalt It Tech Talks round table discussion.

Before we get into deep though, let's meet who's on the panel with me today. Oh, hey everyone. Um, I'm Brian Budin.

I'm the CEO of Data Glue It, and I work in data and business intelligence. Hello folks. Jack Poller here.

I am principal analyst with Paradigm Technica focusing on cybersecurity. I'm Tom Hollingsworth. I work here at Tech Field a and I specialize in all things related to security.

Well, the reason that we wanted to bring the folks like you into this conversation is because far from being a backup company, like, you know, that was the ghetto that, uh, that these companies were maligned to years ago. Convault is really positioning itself in the world of cybersecurity, cyber readiness, uh, compliance, and now very strongly in the world of continuous business operations and recovery in this modern cloud first world. I, for one, was really impressed by overall by the messaging, but it's easy to be impressed by messaging.

It's a lot harder for companies to execute. And that's one thing as well that Commvault has really leaned into. They have a new management team.

They've got executives that are really focused on this next generation infrastructure world. Uh, this is really an all new Commvault, I guess to start things off, uh, Tom, I know that you have been following this space along with me, so I'm gonna call on you first. You know, what was the, your overall impression of Commvault Shift?

I, I honestly think that Commvault really has shifted the way that they're thinking about this in a lot of the things that they were talking about during the whole presentation. I didn't feel any of that traditional backup and recovery type of mentality, right? Like I, I was reading some of the coverage that some of our other great folks had put out, and, and you really get a sense that some companies really do believe that we are just, Hey, when something happens, we're gonna restore from tape and it'll be just like the way it was before anything happened.

And Convault's like, no, no, we don't need to do it that way. We need to look at the possibility of what it takes to get back to good, but also we need to make sure that what we get back is better than what we had. And, and I think that that's so critical to companies out there that have this kind of, I don't know, reactive mindset when it comes to disaster recovery.

Maybe you don't want back what you had. Maybe what you need is operational with the potential to make it better for everyone. I'll, I'll, I'll sort of respond to Tom a little bit in that I agree with you.

Uh, one of the things that, uh, strikes me all the time is that the cybersecurity industry as a whole is focused on the defense and preventing attacks and less on what happens after an attack occurs. And I think Commvault's taking the position that, uh, businesses need to continue operating regardless of what the cause of a catastrophe was. So disaster recovery is no longer about disaster recovery from a mechanical or equipment failure or some sort of IT related issue.

It's from anything that takes your digital infrastructure down. And I think that change in attitude is critical to thinking about it as we need to keep the business operating and we can't separate, um, cybersecurity attacks from on any other IT issue that causes failure. I think you're absolutely right, Jack, and that's one of the things I think a lot of people have had a hard time understanding for forever, is that the modern enterprise, the disasters that you deal with are not hurricanes and tornadoes and fires and things like that.

It's manmade disasters or honestly, man, cause disasters where people are interrupting your service, where people are mass encrypting your data. That's the thing that people have to watch out for. And I think that it finally got to that point when we saw the shift towards data protection, right?

We're, we're not, we're not keeping a copy of the data for a rainy day. We are doing everything we can to ensure the data never gets corrupted or destroyed. And, and to me, Commvault kind of led the way in that because they realized through some of their acquisitions that the, the stodgy old way of doing it wasn't gonna do it anymore.

And, and I think from you, Tom, that's, that, that's a critical point that when we talk about recovery in the cloud, we used to talk about that in terms of one system in the cloud, right? You would have one system in there, and now multi-cloud means so much and so many different things. And some of the big announcements that came out of Commvault were to do with, um, that recovery capability over multi-cloud scenarios.

Because the reality is that businesses don't just sit in Google or AWS or one of these systems, they're spread eagle across all of 'em. And I think the one or one of the quotes that resonated with me at the beginning is, if your business is in the cloud, then cloud is your business. And I think that's just extremely relevant today.

Now, as companies start to move off-prem and into the cloud, it, it, it's much more about being, not just preventing, but being able to recover from those scenarios as well. And that's, to me, one of the most critical things that we've been seeing with these Convault shift shows. So just by comparison, um, you know, last year was the first Commvault shift event.

Previously it had been called Commvault Go, and the management team has shifted. I keep saying that shifted. Um, and, and it, it's obvious that there is a, a, a very different perspective, a very different message, and a very different approach coming out of Commvault.

Now, this had been continued under the previous team, but certainly under this, uh, you know, the leadership of, uh, Sanjay Ani, the company is very aware of the fact that customers don't buy backup to backup data. Companies are not interested in backing up data companies are interested in returning to operations and enabling continuous business. Another thing that's very, very obvious is that this team understands that companies are not just protecting data center applications anymore.

Um, the big themes that came through again and again at shift this time in London especially, were, um, you know, online SaaS applications, cloud first applications, Amazon S3, I mean, they just, you know, a prax is absolutely, I mean, that acquisition was absolutely about, um, doing data protection for cloud native applications. Uh, the acquisition of lumio, I mean, lumio is probably the specialist in, uh, AWS S3 data protection. Um, you know, it, it, it just came through again and again.

And you look at the partners that they've got on their speaking. You know, they, they have, you know, Microsoft Azure, they've got A-A-A-W-S, and they've got GCP. And we heard OCP mentioned as well during the keynote.

Um, do you find this shift credible? Oh, absolutely. But it, it's, I, we, they clearly understand that we've moved to a cloud first world, right?

That the world is moving to cloud. But they also understand that we haven't given up our on-prem infrastructure. So I saw two announcements there that were really key for on-prem that I don't think they highlighted because they wanted to focus on sort of the cloud, which I think is very important.

But they have a, uh, hyperscale X four edge solution. So they have a hyper, uh, hyper-converged infrastructure sort of appliance that enables you to protect your data that's living at the edge. And that applies both for traditional, what we used to call robo remote office, back office type solutions, as well as all of the new edge environments that people are creating to support AI at the edge and all these other things.

So I think that's sort of critical. And the other one that really flew under the radar that was critical for me is the ability to, uh, protect your, uh, active directory infrastructure, right? Your active directory holds, literally holds the keys to the kingdom, holds all the identities that have privilege access to everything in your infrastructure, and it's a prime target for attacks.

Recovering from an attack on active directory is exceedingly difficult. It can take days and days and days, and a lot of manual processes, and there's very few solutions out there to protect your active directory. So by Commvault doing that, they're addressing this sort of, um, critical piece of hidden piece in the infrastructure as well as, uh, sort of broadening their message and saying, you know, wherever you are in your, wherever your infrastructure lives and wherever you have critical data, we're going to protect it.

And I think that message came across loud and clear. Look, I, I, I really get that, Jack, because you know what, again, one of the figures that was, that was called out in the, in the presentations as well, was this 24 day recovery period. And that's, that's a huge amount of time for an enterprise organization and a massive amount of money down the drain recovering from that.

So it's just critical to have these things in place. And, and like you say, active directory is often overlooked because it's not a physical system. It's not, it's not a Google or it's an AWS, but it is critical to the way that everything, uh, hangs together as well.

And, and just tying on to what, what Steven was saying about lumio, as well as someone with a bit of a, you know, a data and business intelligence background, this idea of a source control type approach really appeals to me. And I think some of the announcements that, that they made was to appeal to the, not only the data and analytics side of the community, but also, you know, being able to push a button and make things happen. Ultimately, no one cares about what your business does, right?

They care how you, how it operates in your business. And I think that's why the announcement of Colonial was a big one for me, because this introducing this idea of we have version control is introduces you to a whole different sector of the market, right? That maybe doesn't interpret it that way as well.

And for me, it's, it's the way that I've always worked is to have version control. So to me, that, that, that just completely resonated and why that, that was important. And, you know, that S3 bucket scenario as well, lots of data and lots of, lots of different companies stored in there too.

So I think as an aggregated, so solution overall, I was pretty impressed. That's really hard to achieve too. And, and so the Apix acquisition was huge because Apix truly understands, I mean, their, their whole approach was a true understanding of cloud native applications.

And then Lumio add that to the mix. Um, you know, their special technology, their special deep understanding was, uh, looking across as three buckets and really truly enabling, um, object storage to be part of the picture, not just in terms of dumping data onto it, but in terms of protecting it and rewinding it. So the two of those really go nicely together.

And of course, they also mentioned, you know, application configuration in the cloud, which is huge, and application networking in the cloud. So, Tom, I, I'm curious to hear your, your response to that. I, I love the fact that they talked a lot about why it's so important to be able to back these things up, because I, I, I really do believe that a lot of folks have this idea that if it's in the cloud, it's already backed up.

Well, that's not true. Uh, yes, you are protected from a server throwing a hard drive, but as we've learned over the years, just because it's stored somewhere safe doesn't mean that your data is safe. And I'm gonna go back to the example that we've all heard over the last couple of years about Toy Story two, the, the, the files for Toy Story two were stored on a server in the cloud or a cloud-like thing, and then they got wiped out and there were no backups and nobody had any idea what was going on, except, as we all know, uh, one of the, one of the animators just happened to have an offline copy on a laptop, and they literally had to bring that laptop into the office to reconstitute as much of the movie as they could to save them quite literally years worth of work.

You don't get that if all of your data is stored in the cloud on Office 365 or any of those other places right now. And I know what you're thinking, it's like, oh yeah, I don't have to worry about, you know, if my data going missing unless you delete a file on accident. Or, sorry, I'm gonna have to put on my, uh, black hoodie real quick.

Um, unless someone deletes all your data for you and then wipes out versioning on the system itself, so you don't know where it went and you can't recover all of it, and they're like, oh, we just happen to have a pristine copy of all of the things that make your business run, and for $3 million, you can have it back. I think that that's one of those things that people are kind of underestimating. They just think that cloud is, is there, and applications that run in the cloud will always back things up.

No, they, they won't, don't, don't trust anybody with your important data. If it's the difference between your business going out of business or staying in business, wouldn't a little bit of an investment now make a whole lot more sense? Well, and I think, I think part of that too is, and, and Tom, I'll pick on you a little bit, because the focus on data is what we've tr been traditionally focused on, right?

Is, is, you know, we, our data is critical, but the data is, is an inanimate object, so to speak, without the applications and the infrastructure that allow you to manipulate that data. And one of the things that, uh, the Apex lumio, uh, acquisition gives you is the Cloud Rewind gives you that ability to not only protect your data, but protect your infrastructure in the cloud. And we think, well, okay, well, AWS there, you know, s three's never going down, well, it's not going down, but your configuration, your instantiation of your S3 buckets and your virtual servers and your Kubernetes platforms, all of that, uh, what we, you know, sort of infrastructure as code, all of that infrastructure can disappear.

You can change configuration, you have configuration drift, or, uh, a malicious actor gets in there and tweaks something or destroys all that. How do you go and rebuild that quickly to get up and running? If you don't have a record of it, you can't get to a known good state.

And I think, you know, uh, Steven, you mentioned that sort of, um, the, the, the Lumio and the Cloud rewind go hand in hand, and they are both the same philosophy of being able to walk backwards in time to any point in time and basically be able to identify, this is my last known good state. I wanna st you know, walk backwards in time until I get to that and say, let me start from here and then go continue operating again from this point in time, both from a data perspective and an infrastructure perspective. And that's something that I think is very interesting and very, you know, it's a game changer in a way.

I hate to use that colloquialism, but, Well, Jack, you, you bring up an interesting point, and I think that, that people need to understand this too. It's not just that you have the ability to back that stuff up, it's that it's application aware. Yeah.

And lemme give you an example of this. Going back to the active directory thing, which I completely agree with you on. Backing up, active directory is something we don't think about.

Why? Well, active directory by its very, design is a multi-master replication system, right? Like, I'm going to drop copies of this on all of my peer domain controllers, and that way if one of them goes down, I'm not losing active directory.

We don't think about what happens if the directory itself gets destroyed. But here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was watching that. What happens when everything goes offline, right?

Like, let's just say for whatever reason, you're, you have a, a, a targeted attack that takes every server offline, and now what you're left with is the remnants of the operating system. You have files, you don't have active directory, you have files that you need to recover to get active directory back. I don't know if you've ever tried to do that with something like Microsoft Exchange or Novell e directory, that's impossible.

Like if you just have a collection of files that are gigs in size and no way to understand what that data looks like, you can't recover that. So you have to have a system that can go in and go, I recognize this, this is a backup of active directory at this point in time. So if you can create an environment for me to restore this into, I'm intelligent enough to make it go back the way that it was supposed to be.

Instead of me just holding a pile of data going, I don't know what to do with this. I, I, and I think I, I completely agree with that. And I think what made that message even more impactful was that Convault did a pretty clever thing.

What they did is they interspersed their sessions with almost a theory session with Martin Reeves, which I thought was really impressive actually, to just take that sidestep and realize, okay, our product is great, but we also need to let the audience know, like our six principles of resilient systems of prudence, diversity, embeddedness, redundancy, modularity, adaptiveness, being able to actually sit, stand there and say, this is what you need from a theoretical standpoint, and this is how it applies. I think that was done really well. And you sometimes you don't see that, right?

Sometimes it's just a product, product announcement. But I thought the timing of that was good. And Steven, I think you, you were quite impressed with that as well, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, um, and, and, you know, not to shift gears too much from the content of the there, the technical aspect, because of course we're all focused on that, but it was interesting, um, the way that they, um, enhanced the technical aspect with stories. Um, one of the things too that I, I will say that was really interesting to me was, um, I spoke with some of the attendees on site in London, and I was hearing stories from them reflecting what Jack was just talking about and what you were just talking about, you know, the challenges of protecting cloud first applications and the excitement around being able to do this.

So I know that we're all very excited about, uh, product developments and specifically the focus of, uh, you know, the changing focus of Commvault toward continuous business. But one of the things about Commvault Shift was that it was an event and it had lots of attendees. And, you know, I was there in person in London with a number of our, uh, friends and colleagues including, uh, you know, uh, max Morro, uh, ska Colleen call, uh, Chris Evans, a lot of people that we know.

Uh, we recorded some other things there. But one of the things about, um, going to events like this though, is that it's not just announcing products. It is a announcing, um, customers and partners and so on.

And we certainly saw some partners on stage. You know, we heard from Microsoft Azure, we heard from Pure Storage, we heard from, uh, integrator and, and Partners and that sort of thing. And Commvault a very partner driven business, but they also had panel sessions and presentations, added presentations to sort of give us some flavor and some context for these announcements.

So first up, um, let's look at the panel session, the panel discussion, which was really focused on compliance. Um, Brian, what did you think of the, uh, panel discussion? I, I thought this was really interesting from a couple of angles, Steve.

I think that, um, the, the, the hallowed phrase of Dora was mentioned, and none of us could have predicted that coming into this as well, but in terms of legislation and the, the, these types of things really affect these types of solutions and maybe not in the direct way that we expect, right? And I, I think one of the interesting things about legislation like Dora is that not many people understand the scale of it, right? Except for Jack who said that he'd read it from cover to cover.

But most people, um, they don't understand the scale of it. And I think one of the interesting things that was discussed there is that Dora is understanding Dora is not just a project, it's a transformation, right? So it's not something that you can just flick a switch and you've got DORA compliance.

And I, I think what's interesting about that is Commvault have never at any point said that we will solve Dora, or we will solve this legislative issue for you. They're just oiling the wheels to make it as easy as possible and to give you the options to do that. But that, I think that transformation piece is really important to understand that, that the gravity of what you're dealing with there as well, and a couple of other things that, that struck me from that panel is that, that there was this recognition that things, we are living in a tech space right now where things are moving equally quickly and slowly at the same time.

So things that we have to adapt to the way that we are recovering and storing things incredibly quickly, both in terms of reacting to it, but also in terms of being able to, um, you know, understand how we react to it as well. But at the same time, we have a huge amount of users that still don't even remember to change their password. So where do you find the middle ground there?

And I think that's why the panel discussion was really useful is, and I think Commvault did a good, good job there because they, they, they gave a nod to those companies that, that maybe are feeling a little bit, they're still in the, they're still in the tumble dryer, they're still spinning around a little bit with everything that's happening with the legislation. So I thought that was reflected pretty well. One of the things that struck me about that is that the, the recognition, the recognition by Commvault, that compliance and regulations is not just a sort of separate thing that hangs as word on the side of your business, right?

That meet that complying with regulations like Dora and other regulations like GDPR and all of that, um, extends throughout your IT environment and involves a lot of different groups and a lot of different organizations. And it's a continuous process, not a point in time process. And I think that sort of fits in with the Commvault message of, you know, continuous business resiliency.

And so I thought that that, that sort of panel discussion with the different perspectives coming in, and as you, you know, as you said, Brian, that the, the recognition that we want it, we, we have to, on the one hand, we're trying to, to race to keep ahead of all of these new regulations that are coming in place. And yet from a cybersecurity perspective, for some other perspectives, we're barely covering the, the table stakes requirements of minimum password requirements and, and MFA, right? So it's all a balancing act.

And, uh, one of the things that, uh, Commvault brought up was, um, in the product section, was talking about the ability to rebalance. And I think, you know, continuously rebalance your environment. And I think from a, a compliance perspective and from the panel perspective, that that balancing act came through and that the different perspectives and different priorities of companies at different stages all comes into play.

And again, it's sort of the, the Commvault, I think is projecting the message which came through, which is, you know, we're meeting the customers where they are is, you know, depending on what stage you are, we still have the ability to help you. Yeah, I have to say that, um, the panel was, was great. I think that, um, you know, not to, to give anybody short shrift, but I wanna call out, especially Patrick, uh, Smith from Pure Storage and, uh, Kat Summer from NCC group, both of them on the panel, um, were really, really, um, insightful and also honestly pretty entertaining in their positioning of, uh, compliance issues, which is not always easy to do.

Um, but, but it, it was a, it was a solid panel. Um, I really enjoyed it. But for me, um, one of the highlights as well was, uh, the presentation or the interview discussion with Martin Reeves, um, at the end of the, uh, at the end of the event.

Now he came in and talked about disruption, uh, business disruption. But to me, the, the, the really cool thing that he brought up wa was he wasn't, um, pessimistic about this. He was optimistic, and I loved what he had to say about the fact that when your business is disrupted, it's an opportunity to reimagine and reinvent and kind of come back stronger than you were before.

That reflects my own experience. Uh, you'll never just return to operations, you return to operations in a new way, and, and that's an opportunity. So, um, Jack, what did you think of the, uh, the discussion with Mar Martin Reeves?

I thought it was absolutely fabulous, and that was, that was part of it that resonated with me as well. You know, Brian, I think mentioned that, you know, was there was the theory there with, um, you know, how do you go from anticipating an event to absorbing the event, to adapting to it. And then he, he specifically called out instead of recovering from the event, is reimagining it.

And I think he, he had some great examples and, uh, that were great, and he related it, you know, he talked about the, uh, human body's adaptability to, uh, and the immune system's adaptability to recover from events and, and be different afterwards. And, you know, look at the world we're in now three years post Covid, which completely changed the way we operate. Business was a massive disruption to our businesses.

And now we live in a world where, um, you know, it's a, anywhere, any device, anytime remote workforce that's always on, always working. And that didn't, we didn't have those capabilities three years ago. And so, you know, we don't think about it as, you know, that's, you know, disaster recovery, recovery from event and business resilience, but that's really what it was, you know, and putting that into a framework, I think crystallized, uh, a whole lot of what Commvault was talking to for me, And that, and that, I think that to, to carry on with that, Jack, I think that recovery readiness was something that he talked about as well.

And being able to get to those latter stages of adapting and re-imagining, if you're recovery ready and you, you're set for this, that 24 day period, the, the most of that is used in that, those latter phases rather than those earlier ones, right? And that can be the difference between, you know, saving a company and not saving a company or millions of dollars here, millions of dollars there. So these things are crucial and they matter.

And getting, getting to those adapt, getting to that adaption reimagination stage quickly and being prepared to get there, I think is a, is a crucial thing that I picked up from that conversation as well. Yeah, it really was a, a lot of fun to, to tune in, and it was a nice way to sort of end the discussion as well, because it can seem like these things are all doom and gloom and, um, you know, you know, watch out for the cyber attackers, watch out for, you know, government actors and intrusions, you know, watch out for, you know, compliance, watch out for business and data loss and interruption and all these things, things, uh, sometimes it's good. Sometimes a little bit of a, of a shakeup can be helpful.

Well, Steven, you know, the, the, I'll give a huge kudos and credit to Commvault and all of its guests and panelists, um, both from a graphics perspective and a presentation perspective, as there were no hackers in the hoodie. There were no bad guys here. It was, it was, it was all about, and again, like I said, it's all about what happens after, you know, preparing for and what happens after the event, not let's focus on the events itself.

And I think that's really important and key to, from a business resiliency point of view, because it doesn't matter what type of event it was or what caused it, it's how do we move on from here? Yeah, I, I, I absolutely, and, and I actually noted, um, it was kind of funny. The event was actually located, um, just down the road from MI six headquarters and just across the river from Parliament.

And so I noted how amusing it was that they, they had that metaphorical, um, position in between those two polls, because that's really some of the, uh, the challenges that businesses face, you know? Right. I mean, there's, uh, there's, um, spies and hackers and on the one hand, and then there's government regulations on the other hand.

Um, so it was, it was a fun, uh, fun spot. And it was, uh, I, I agree. They handled it nicely.

It was very, very slick. Very, very well done. Um, there was also a, a, an additional presentation that those in the room actually didn't get to see.

Uh, well, we saw Nick patience in the room, but we didn't get to see his video. Um, Tom, what did you think of our colleague, uh, Futurum group colleague? Uh, Nick?

Patience. I would just like to point out that we made it almost a half an hour into this before we said the words ai, which, uh, is, is kind of funny. But no, this was a great panel, uh, discussing, you know, some of the, the promises, but also some of the perils of ai.

And, and I agree, Nick did an amazing job on this. He, he kind of brought up some real world examples and, you know, in, in his role, he gets to see a lot of what's going on with ai. And, and there was some good discussion here.

I, I kinda like how you, you almost led me into this by saying, you know, oh, that sometimes it feels like there's a lot of doom and gloom around like, you know, uh, cyber hackers and, and government regulations and, and those kinds of things. Ironically enough, we don't see any of that when we talk about ai. All I hear is we've gotta do this because everybody else is doing it.

And the people at Commvault were like, hold on a minute. The attackers that are gonna be looking at your infrastructure have access to the same AI tools that you do, which means they're gonna be using those to come up with novel and unique ways to attack it. So you need to be using AI to be more proactive in your defense.

Also, what happens when a government organization suddenly decides to pass legislation that eliminates certain aspects of ai? I mean, we almost saw that in California in, you know, this month October as we're we're recording this, where it, the, the bill made it all the way to the government governor's desk before he vetoed it. But like, how would it feel if you had built this entire AI strategy around data storage and usage and things like that?

And then you wake up on a Tuesday afternoon and all of a sudden you don't have any anything to reference anymore because now the laws have changed. You have to stay on top of it. And, and one of the things that I said in, in my coverage of this on, uh, over on X was AI is absolutely a key business imperative.

If you listen to anybody in the industry, including folks like Daniel Newman and Nick Patience, they'll tell you over and over again, absolutely critical. But you can't let it just run with, with the reigns off. You've gotta have a control on it, whether you are defending against people using it to attack you, or you are preventing it from running unregulated on a whole bunch of data.

Because, you know, simple little things like, uh, what if I let it read through my, uh, HR database and now all of a sudden I have PII in the training model and I don't know how to get rid of it because I didn't put guardrails in place. Like nobody thought about that. Oh yeah.

Maybe letting it run unregulated in my PII is a bad thing. Alright, la last thing I'll just add onto that, Tom, is that we are still very early in the cycle of technology, right? It seems like we are, are like deeply embedded underneath the water with a snorkel sticking out.

But in reality, we're really just 18 months down the line here. That's how recent it is. Since chat GPT popped up into our lives and we started finding out about all of these technologies, which in reality have been around for a long time.

So I think there is still a note of approach with caution here, and I would never criticize any company for approaching with caution in this particular area at the moment because like you say, legislation usually comes like halfway through the hype cycle and we're only just on the way up. So let's just see where we are in a couple of years time, I would say, Yeah, it was, uh, interesting to hear just a little bit of ai 'cause that's not how it's been at basically every other industry event and every other industry presentation so far this year. Um, and, and one of the things that they also hinted at, and I think that this is very smart, is that as businesses, uh, roll out generative AI applications, they're gonna need to have, uh, data protection and compliance, uh, recovery of, um, of AI models and training data sets and that sort of thing.

And, and I wouldn't be surprised if Commvault introduces some AI features soon, though it doesn't seem that they specifically have that yet. It definitely seems like it's on their radar. So before we wrap up here, I wanna give y'all a chance to find summarize.

Uh, what did you think of Commvault shift? What do you think of Commvault's position in the market and what do you think of the market overall? Uh, I'll start with the event itself I think was very well done.

Um, especially from a remote perspective, it's very easy to sort of get, uh, overwhelmed with both information and, uh, the length of time. So I thought they did great on both how they presented the information and the sort of the time it took to present that, um, from the business overall, I think Commvault is putting a stake in the ground in cyber resiliency. And there, that to me is very, very important, as I said, being, being sort of living in the cybersecurity world, um, where everybody is focused on the first half of the equation, which is protecting against threats.

And we know that attacks are successful. Everybody's, you know, companies are attacked multiple times a day and, uh, it's sad, but everybody suffers an attack. Um, so, you know, I think being able to recover from it and continued business operations in the face of, you know, changing your perspective from data protection to recovery and op continuing operations, regardless of what caused your issue is very important.

And I think, um, Commvault sort of putting, you know, laying it out on the table and saying, we're here, this is where we're gonna do, and the, we want to sort of drag the industry, whether it's, you know, everybody's running in the same direction as Commvault, or they're kicking and screaming, I think this is the way the industry needs to go. So I was very impressed and very happy to see that. Yeah, look, I think, I think it was a really good, um, event.

I think that the, the way that they summarized things and pitched it between sort of features and why the features matter to you, for me, that's what makes things resonate, right? When I hear about a bunch of features, they don't mean anything on their own, but when I start to understand why they're important and what the use cases are, I think that really makes things stick out. So when you think about like, you know, full stack application protection, and I start to hear about phrases like total cost of ownership, that they're respecting us as customers and they understand that we, you know, there's a cost implication to this thing as well.

And when you start to tie that together with the security and compliance and the, you know, data management has been fragmented and, and that recovery is not just about data. And I think that was the biggest thing that came out of this for me, is that recovery is not just about data, it's about the state of where you are in the cloud. And when you tie that to something that you effectively are seeing you for some situations, you have a one button recovery for that.

I think that's extremely powerful, and that's a message that they resonated pretty well. Uh, I also have to give a little bit of, uh, props to the, the deep base on the little logo intro, outro, which was pretty cool to listen to online as well, if you had the right speaker set up. So overall, a really good event, Steve.

I was impressed. Well, I think one of the things that really kind of stood out to me about this is the idea that Convault's trying to do everything as easily as possible, you know, making it as automated as they can, uh, getting humans outta the loop. And this is, this is a narrative that we've heard for years, almost decades at this point.

The problem with all of these things has nothing to do with recovery time. Like we've, we've gotten that down to a science, right? Like, I can log into my array and see when my last good backup was that I know is free from, you know, data encryption or, or corruption or what have you.

The problem is that the, the time between when that is identified and when a person actually goes in and runs the scripts to do that can cause a lot of problems. And I know that most of the companies who'd be using Commvault have a number in their mind of how many, uh, dollars per minute it costs when we don't have the ability to do business. And so when you're talking about reducing outage times from days to hours or from hours to minutes, that can make a huge difference.

And, and Commvault needs to continue to, to talk about this. You know, we we're getting you back to a running state faster with less human intervention, because the more handoffs you have, the more likely it is that something's gonna get dropped along the way. And that, to me is the sign of a mature company that understands that the market has changed around them.

And there aren't a lot of those companies that are left, a lot of them went out of business because they could not change with the times. So they, they went outta business, their assets got bought, you know, some of the ones that are still around we've heard about are good. But, you know, I'm, I'm positive for where Commvault's going with this, because it feels like they've really turned the corner.

Yeah, I, I, I would say so. Um, I think that that, that it was a combination for me of messaging and, um, product. And, you know, it's important to me that companies understand their market, understand their customer's needs, and, uh, are working to address that.

But it's also important, in fact, maybe more important that they're actually putting their development resources in that direction. And it cl and it seems clear to me that that's exactly what we're, what's happening here. Um, uh, all in all a a solid event.

com/shift. Um, you'll be able to see the videos there. Uh, also I would recommend checking out a, uh, video interview that Daniel Newman, Patrick Moorhead did with, uh, Commvault CO.

Uh, we'll include links here as well as a video that I recorded with, uh, my friends, max Morro and, uh, Chris Evans, uh, on site, uh, where we dive into some of these, uh, aspects as well. com where we have a live blo blog of reactions from social media, from our friends who were involved in this event. And we will be publishing a series of articles in the coming weeks, uh, talking about, uh, their reactions to the event.

So thank you very much, uh, the three of you for joining us, uh, for this discussion, also for joining us as, uh, Commvault, uh, shift, uh, virtually, and, uh, as well as, uh, in person. And, uh, we look forward to hearing more from Commvault and hearing more overall, uh, here at Gestalt. It.

That's all we got. Thanks a lot.