Commvault, a recognised global enterprise leader in intelligent data services across on-premises, cloud, and software as a service (SaaS) environments, has appointed StorVault as a Managed Services Provider (MSP) for its Metallic Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform in South Africa.

Gerhard Fourie, Channel Lead at Commvault Africa, says that due to StorVault’s long-standing relationship as a Commvault software MSP, it was a natural fit to appoint the company to the Metallic MSP programme in South Africa.

“We approached StorVault to join the Metallic MSP programme based on their already vast knowledge and understanding of Commvault’s business model and offerings. With the inception of the Metallic MSP programme, our idea was to look for service providers that have a rich history and understanding of traditional Commvault offerings.”

Fourie notes that both small and large enterprise customers are beginning to show growing interest in SaaS offerings such as Metallic, as they increasingly recognise the benefits that these solutions bring during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Entire spectrum of data protection

Metallic is part of Commvault's Intelligent Data Services Platform that allows organisations to proactively simplify and manage the complexity of enterprise data. Microsoft leverages Commvault to manage and protect some of its most important data, including data in Azure, Office and other technologies.

Metallic covers the entire spectrum of data protection, with its biggest focus being the protection of Microsoft 365 environments that are hosted on the Microsoft cloud platform. It is also the ideal platform to protect hybrid cloud environments and workloads, including end-point devices, physical server environments and virtual environments. 

StorVault General Manager Rudi Jansen van Vuuren says that the company has a solid track record with reselling Commvault services and solutions into the business partner channel throughout South Africa, and that joining the Metallic MSP programme was a natural progression of this relationship.

“We’ve made significant investments in a front-end portal that enables our business partners to provision all Commvault services easily and effectively. We have also invested in world-class cloud infrastructure and expert professional technical support capabilities as part of our commitment to Commvault offerings. Considering our commitment in the Commvault ecosystem, Metallic was a natural fit and it complements what we already do.”

Untapped market 

Derek Street, Business Development Manager at StorVault, explains that there is still a large untapped market in the SMB space, as backup systems are traditionally seen as quite onerous, with companies having to invest in managing and owning them, along with looking after licensing, hardware and infrastructure requirements.

“This can be onerous, but the MSP model, where Metallic fits in, is easy to use and predictable, so the solution takes away all the complexity and unknowns, allowing the end user to scale up or down as they need.

“The Metallic MSP offering provides our business partners with a bigger and broader market space in which they can play and increases the breadth of customers they can approach with our expert support.” 

He adds that StorVault’s extensive professional support capabilities for the Metallic platform includes pre- and post-sales support for the business partner network as well as their end user customers.