Commvault has a long legacy for an enterprise IT company, but their GO conference still has that new car smell. Commvault GO 2017 will be their second annual conference, this year moving up from Orlando to Washington, DC.
It seems to be part of the company’s strategy to move public perception of them away from strictly backup and recover. Instead Commvault is positioning themselves as a data management platform. This isn’t just marketing bluster. Their recently announced HyperScale Appliance aims squarely into the secondary storage, gunning for companies like Cohesity and Rubrik.
To that effect, Commvault is expecting roughly two-thousand attendees at GO 2017. Most of these will be the customers and prospects they’re hoping to reinforce with this data management vision.
GO isn’t the largest of company conferences, you won’t be confusing the scale with SAP Sapphire or AWS re:Invent any time soon. But that might be one of the core strength and benefits. The show is laid out with all breakout sessions done in small theaters right on the show floor. Press, attendees, and staff will all get to mingle during the course of the event. This gives it not just approachability, but also an opportunity to experience the event in some semblance of a totality. You won’t be able to attend the 150+ planned sessions, but its much easier to get the total vision of GO than perhaps possible at other events.
Commvault has two interesting keynote speakers on tap to lead off GO 2017. First up is Robert Swan, motivational speaker and arctic sojourner, in fact the first person to walk to the North and South Poles (although presumably a boat was used at some point to at least get to Antarctica). Interestingly Swan will leave from the conference to undertake the South Pole Energy Challenge”, attempting to reach the South Pole again using only renewable energy. After that, attendees will get to hear from Captain Sully Sullenberger from the famed “Miracle on the Hudson.”
The speakers, while not coming from a data management background, tie into Commvault’s theme for the conference in interesting ways. The conference is themed around “Find Your Path to Remarkable”, which the speakers certainly qualify with. But even on a data management front, while neither Swan or Sullenberger dealt in high density data, they both have experiences that show the importance of getting the most value from it.
Of the planned breakout sessions, I’m most interested in hearing more about their new HyperScale secondary storage solution and ransomware mitigation. While there are not shortage of ransomware mitigation and recovery products on the market, the category itself remains emergent. We haven’t settled on how an enterprise best recovers from an attack. I think secondary storage might end up being the consensus preferred way to handle it. If so, the HyperScale and ransomware session would nicely dovetail at GO 2017.
Commvault GO looks to build on the company’s success of last year. Based on the company’s recent spate of announcements, the event looks to have a lot to offer whether you’re an engineer looking to get training and certifications, or a VP of infrastructure looking for more high level information.
Commvault GO will be held at the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel & Convention Center in Washington, D.C.from November 6-8. Register can be found here.
