The pace at Commvault Systems Inc. is noticeably picking up following the hire of a new chief executive officer in February.

Over the past eight months, Commvault brought former Puppet Inc. CEO Sanjay Mirchandani on board, acquired software-defined storage vendor Hedvig Inc. for $225 million, and launched a new cloud-native data protection venture called Metallic Backup.

After more than three decades in the information-protection world, Commvault is making major changes while remaining focused on data at the center of its business.

“It’s data at the core,” said Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Commvault GO event in Aurora, Colorado. “Coming from Puppet, Sanjay knows about DevOps and agile and he’s going to bring some of that in. He’s going to bring in a team that’s going to infuse some change in the culture, and I expect Commvault to be moving a little faster.”

Miniman was joined by co-host Lisa Martin on the opening day of Commvault GO, and they discussed the company’s focus on the software-defined space and its newly released software-as-a-service product (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Expanded software-defined presence

On Tuesday, Commvault announced new capabilities for Hedvig’s storage solutions. These included management support for Kubernetes, erasure coding for storage efficiency and tools for multi-data center cluster administration.

“The Hedvig acquisition gives them a much larger presence in this software-defined space, but it also is going to give them a bigger total addressable market expansion,” Martin said. “We’re seeing not just the technology announcements with Hedvig for the large-scale enterprises, and at least three-quarters of Commvault revenue comes from that large space, but also some sales leadership changes that they’ve made. You’re seeing a lot of focus on mid-market and enterprise.”

The launch of Metallic Backup this week provides Commvault with a SaaS product that is consumption-based and designed to support the firm’s mid-market customers.

“They built it within months, from the ground up, from the internal team,” Miniman noted. “They call it ‘SaaS Plus,’ and we need to understand a little bit more of the technology.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Commvault GO. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Commvault GO. Neither Commvault Systems, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Commvault Systems