This year marks the third annual Commvault GO customer conference for industry veteran Commvault. This year the company is moving the conference from Washington DC, and getting a little country in Nashville. For these types of shows, I like to try and read the tea leaves of the annual slogan. It doesn’t approach the Kremlinology that something like an Apple event generates, but I still think there’s value to be gained in the exercise. This year, Commvault invites attendees to “Picture the Possibilities.”
At first glance, this comes off as vaguely aspirational, but not much else. But looking at the state of Commvault in 2018, and it quickly becomes apparent what kind of possibilities the company now provides. Over the last few years, Commvault has gone to considerable lengths to refashion themselves as a company not just focusing on backup and recovery, but with the more ambitious mandate of data management.
Commvault makes picturing these possibilities easier with their focused solutions portfolio. Today, this effectively has been narrowed down to four things. Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery is their core offering, and offers modern data protection for physical, virtual, and cloud applications. This is now served up as a pure software play, or on an appliance.
The Commvault HyperScale appliance is their second offering, and provides a true scale out approach to backup. This is where Commvault’s legacy in the industry becomes a real strength for them. They’re able to offer this modern architecture, but back-ended by tried and true data services. As Commvault continues to mature in their data management mission, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the appliance side expand into a more focused secondary storage solution.
Their product portfolio is rounded out with Commvault Orchestrate, which syncs data across environments, and Commvault Activate, for analytics and data visibility. While HyperScale is a physical manifestation of modern Commvault, in many ways these two offerings are just as important for their data management vision. In terms of possibilities, Commvault Orchestrate and Activate open up a whole new world to their customers.
But picturing the possibilities is only one part of what Commvault needs to go at this year’s Commvault GO conference. Perhaps more important than that is also helping customer move to achieving those possibilities. That’s where the event’s 150 breakout sessions will be vital. Commvault hopes to excite attendees imagination with their keynotes, looking at how other people are using modern data management to achieve impressive things.
These session will provide the technical background from partners and other customers that will lay the path to actualizing those aspirations. These will outline the best practices and real world processes to take the tools that Commvault offers and turn them into solutions for everything from complex big data implementations to workload modernization.
Commvault wants their customer to come to GO ready to picture the possibilities. But they’ve set up the event to have customers leave the event with knowledge and training to make those possibilities happen. I really like the direction that Commvault is taking with GO. Many of the larger conferences have turned into glorified networking exercises that are easy to put on an expense account.
But Commvault GO is setup to be different. It’s not enough to fire up their customers with a platonic vision of data management. Commvault has set up a comprehensive selection of breakout sessions to make sure these visions become their new reality.
Commvault GO will be held at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee from October 9-11. Registration can be found here.
