Transforming Cyber Resilience with Commvault

How is Commvault tackling the challenges of enterprise cyber resilience in an era shaped by AI, cloud, and evolving security risks?

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Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Commvault's Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO, for a conversation on Commvault’s leadership in transforming enterprise cyber resilience and how the company is positioning itself to meet emerging risks and requirements. The discussion explores Commvault’s strategic moves, including the recent acquisition of Satori, its evolving role in AI cyber resilience, and what to expect from the upcoming SHIFT event. 

Key Takeaways:

🔹The Rising Imperative of Cyber Resilience: A deep dive into the increasing pressures organizations face to recover quickly from sophisticated cyberattacks and outages, underscoring the escalating costs of downtime and the growing demand for robust resilience.

🔹Strategic Innovation through Acquisition: An analysis of Commvault’s recent strategic acquisitions—including Satori Cyber, Appranix, and Clumio—and how these moves are expanding the company’s core capabilities to better address cloud security, data protection, and resilient infrastructure.

🔹Leveraging AI for Smarter Data Protection: Insights into how Commvault is strategically leveraging AI to enhance its service to customers, from advanced threat detection and proactive response to orchestrating faster, more intelligent recoveries.

🔹A Look Ahead to SHIFT 2025: An exclusive preview of the upcoming SHIFT event in New York where Commvault will unveil unique cyber resilience innovations in the AI-era, conduct hands-on resilience workshops, and feature experts from AWS, Microsoft, HPE, Deloitte, and others.

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Learn more about Commvault SHIFT:
https://events.commvault.com/event/SHIFT2025/summary_?_gl=1*t6fq6y*_gcl_au*MTcwNDE5NTAzMC4xNzUwMjUzMzU0

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Patrick Moorhead: I am Pat, and this is Daniel. And Daniel, we are talking about our favorite subject, which of course is cyber resiliency. Actually, it's AI. It's all we talk about. But it's amazing how cyber resiliency and AI are matching today.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it's very funny. You actually threw me for a loop because I thought you were going to jump straight to AI when you did that little pause. You said cyber resiliency. It's like actually one of the big themes that we've been pushing pretty hard. And I know UF2 has been the emergence of cyber with the tailwind of AI but really could come out straight away and not give the AI props as it's been what now? Three years of just absolute, pervasive, endless AI. But it's also been great for us. I mean, what we do is analyzing the industry, watching, learning, pontificating. I mean, we're having a ton of fun, Pat. But yeah, it's great to be here for this virtual webcast here on the Six Five. What a great topic. What a great guest we have.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, no, totally. And one company that's been crushing in this space has obviously been Commvault. And whether its Clumio acquisition, Satori acquisition built, you know, nearly billion dollars in. In ARR. And big growth in. In subscriptions. It is my pleasure to introduce Back to The Six Five Sanjay. How are you doing, my friend?

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Sanjay Mirchandani: I am very well and thank you guys. Good to see you both. You look well.

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Patrick Moorhead: Thank you. We're trying. Trying very hard.

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Sanjay Mirchandani: I follow you.

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Daniel Newman: We got to be careful, though, not to let this be like on our regular show, Sanjay, Pat and I have these little diatribes. We run down these tangential conversations about our weightlifting, nutrition, fitness peptides. And so we joke because we don't want to draw our guests into this mess, but sometimes we do. But you know what makes these shows interesting is you get a little personal, get to get to know Sanjay a little bit more. You get to know Pat a little bit more. Nobody wants to know me any more than they currently do.

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Sanjay Mirchandani: You look good. You look good, guys. Keep it up.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, so let's. Let's jump in, man. We've. It's been a year and over the year, I've watched your earnings. I see the shares each quarter. Really good stuff. But let's just kind of start broad and then we'll get a little bit more into some of the depth and M and A and other things you're doing. But like, what do you see as what's kind of driving the demand that's been leading to these great results quarter after quarter?

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Sanjay Mirchandani: Yeah, no, thank you for noticing. We've been working hard and it's been a year. It's surprising. It was around shift last year that we connected, and it's almost time to shift this year, so we'll talk about that, I'm sure. But what's happening is the world is moving from protection, in my, in my opinion, to resilience. So protection is kind of a tablespace. You have to make sure that you're well protected, whether it be on the perimeter or your data. And those two worlds have come together quite quite well, if you would. So you're, you know, you're protecting to make sure that you make it hard for the bad actors to get in. And, and then, you know, if you believe that they might or they have, then you make sure that the cross crown jewels are well protected. We've talked about that for many years and we've gotten really, hopefully really good at that. But that conversation has moved to resilience, our ability not just to protect, but the ability for a business to truly recover. Okay. Be it a cyber attack, be it a natural disaster, be it anything else that affects your business. So as, as you know, the conversations that I, as a CEO have with other CEOs is, you know, how. How do you feel about the resilience of your business? We talk about concepts like a minimum viable company. You know, what are the minimum components? What's the minimum component componentry that you need to bring your business back to life till you can do everything else? Okay. So that's been driving the conversations. I also like to say that, you know, it's, it's. It's gone from being a backroom conversation to a boardroom conversation. And that. That is a tailwind in the conversations.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it is amazing. A concept like cyber resiliency, it's one of those that everybody nods their head and says, yes, this is the right thing to do. But it does take a while to get everybody on the same page. You know, moving from, listening to, to backing up is cool too, but that's not. That doesn't mean cyber resiliency. So, yeah, it's amazing how long it takes, but I think this is just a classic enterprise. Enterprise behavior. So, Sanjay, last time we had you on, we talked about Clumio and the thinking behind this acquisition. Here we Go again, like on Q, you've acquired another company.

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Daniel Newman: I like inquisitive guys. I like people that are. That's, that's you and me. Yeah.

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Sanjay Mirchandani: Fact is that we've only bought five companies in our history, all under my watch. But last year we did a few. Yeah, we did a couple.

Patrick Moorhead: So, yeah. So like on cue, here we go. But no, let's talk about Satori Cyber. What's the strategic thinking about it? Maybe talk about the benefit today, but also more in the future. Maybe we talk about the timing of like why now? Right.

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Sanjay Mirchandani: Yeah, yeah.

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Patrick Moorhead: You could build it yourself, you could do these things. But what's the rationale behind this?

Sanjay Mirchandani: Sure. So if you, if you agree with the premise that I have that data protection and data security have been coming together quite systematically, then the platform we provide Commvault cloud to our customers needs to have industrial strength security capabilities built. Okay. Now that doesn't mean I'm doing the stuff that pure play security folks do. You know, I call on the left, you know, the defending, the identifying, all the things that you do there. But you need, and that keeps evolving, but you need to make sure that your platform has security built right in. So in the case of Satori Cyber, what we're doing there is they're bringing us a level of observability, they're bringing us a level of being able to really keep data compliant and for whatever use it is that you, that you have inside, inside of your business. Satori does a really good job with structured data. They're doing some work. As to your question, what does it mean in the future in being able to do policy based capabilities with say how you train your LLMs? Okay, so there's different use cases, but what it gives you is the observability inside of our platform. So then whether, and so the data that we're protecting is secure by design. Okay. It's more secure by design and it keeps going. You keep extending the concentric circles of security around that data the best you can. So this is a very purpose built capability that we think is going to add a whole ton of value. Also, don't forget, as much as we're all steeped in the AI conversation, customers that we deal with are hybrid by design. Exactly. And so they've got large data assets on premise, they've got data in flight, they've got data in the cloud, it's moving between clouds, it's got SaaS apps. And so that observability and that compliance capability is paramount. And so we're, you know, as soon as we finish the acquisition, it gets built right into the platform as value for US customers.

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Patrick Moorhead: It is. And the reality is that you have to modernize to do AI, but most people are modernizing too. Everything is not going to be AI enabled and you have to do both as well. And this bifurcation of workloads, like I like to call it, there's a requirement now for what I like to call a hybrid multi cloud fabric. And, and you have a hybrid multi cloud fabric for cyber resiliency. So, yeah, I'm, I'm on board with that.

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Daniel Newman: That's the thinking. Well, that's, that's the whole show right there. We just cut it off. Said, he's on board with what you're doing. Take the clip, run. But I, I just want to go back to, you know, Sanjay and my guy here. Five acquisitions, in a short period of time. I, I do want to pridefully say, or un. Pridefully say I've done more in my tiny little company. I knew you.

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Patrick Moorhead: I knew you'd find a way to get your own victory lap.

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Daniel Newman: I'm not even sure that's a victory because I think my next question will actually tell if this is a victory because acquisitions are hard. Meaning that, like, the idea is great, like, let's smash together these products, let's smash together these people. Then you've got culture, you've got product innovation, you've got tons of leadership challenges. Who takes the lead on certain things. So it's not all fun and games. I mean, and that's kind of what I asked you. So you, you know, Satori, it follows, you know, just 18 months, you added Apprenix, you added Clumio. How's that progressing? Because, like I said, the numbers look good, but I don't know, is it, is it because of the accretive nature and success, or are you still kind of wading through the culture and the shifts of these deals?

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Sanjay Mirchandani: You know, each of those were very purposefully acquired. You know, they were very unique in what they do. And so let me just, if you don't mind, I'll rewind a little bit to the last one. Plumio. Now, Plumio is, as a company, they specialize in AWS and AWS level protection. And it was a cloud native platform built from ground up, extremely modern architecture. And what they did very well was high volume, scalable protection. So when you're using S3 as an example and you're writing millions of objects into your buckets. Protecting that workload as it grows over time requires very unique capabilities, both from an AWS implementation, but also just the way you, you skin it, just the way you do it. You know, costs become important, laws of physics become important, time to recover becomes important. And they built some amazing ip, had some really loyal customers, and we took that product and we continue to enhance it. It integrates into the platform, but it also has core AWS capability as customers want. Some customers said, we just want that stuff, we want that and you know, and have at it. They, they, you know, they, that, that, that, that's been doing well for us. And also what it's starting to do is it's starting to protect what the componentry that over time will be AI, the large data sets, the high velocity data sets, the, the variety of data that it needs, that needs to be backed up, the provenance of that data. And so, you know, over time, as stacks get more standardized, we think we have a great story, and it's not the only story, but we have a great story specializing in the AWS capability and we love it. We've added customers, it's growing. If you rewind a little, prior to that, we had a Pranax, you mentioned Apprentice. And Paramex is unique and continues to be very unique in what it does. It's cloud native and it protects cloud native applications on any cloud. So a cloud native application, if I oversimplified, has the actual config of that loosely coupled application. It has the metadata and it has the data. And to bring that back to life, we've taken, you know, I talked about resilience. It's not just the data we bring back, but the whole app and the state. And that's unique. It's unique, continues to be very unique and it's doing really well for us. So we bought those because of the fundamental premise that one size doesn't fit all. Okay. It just doesn't. And in a truly hybrid enterprise, the fabric has to use your term, and that has to extend into cloud native apps, traditional apps, edge apps, now AI apps. And so the resilience, you're only as good as your workload coverage. Okay. And we're trying to make sure that what's held us in good stead over the past few years continues to hold as well as customers get more diversity in their workloads, especially with AI, AI type characteristics.

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Patrick Moorhead: So technologically these companies are coming together because one of the challenges of any acquisition, particularly services and software, is technologically pulling these together so you have a platform that you can build on as opposed to kind of, you know, piecing, piecing stuff together. If those companies are on different platforms.

Sanjay Mirchandani: I don't think there's a single formula. Okay. And we haven't done a ton of acquisitions. We've done some, I think they've gone really well for us and we learn how to acquire companies and then really make them. Successful acquisition is what is just the spending of the money and bringing in the capability. Then you've got to make it successful, which is where I think Dan was going with this question. I don't believe there's a one size fits all in the case of Plumio. We've left the goodness of Plumio the way it was built with the right integrations into all platforms. So if we have a commvault platform customer, Congo, cloud customer and they want to use Clumio, it's a federated thing that they can get to it or vice versa. Okay. With the Pranix, we've brought it into the platform and so you spin up the products capability from the platform and, and the value lies in, you know, cloud native, but also the rest of it. So it really depends on the teams. We've, we've, we've integrated I think at the right level and in some cases we've kept them fairly, fairly insulated, you know, like keeping them together because they do their best work in the way they operate and you know, the founders of both companies are very active. Yeah, you know, you know we, I don't think it's one size fits all.

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Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Sorry to go in the weeds but you know, I get that question every once in a while about, you know, from your potential customers and stuff like that. Hey, I can't believe we've gone almost 15 minutes here Sanjay, and we haven't done the deep dive on AI. Right. We've seen how you've been able to take advantage of AI. We've seen some announcements on how you are able to integrate AI. Can you talk a little bit about overall the fundamental strategy, how you are looking at AI right now?

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Sanjay Mirchandani: Sure. And you guys have known me for a while. We're not the company that rushes in with, you know, with hype cycle announcements. We like to make sure we've got something that truly, that truly solves a hard problem for a customer and we pride ourselves on that. That's just the philosophy of the company. We are. So the way I look at it, look at AR is it's in Layers and it's evolving every day. Okay, the first layer is productivity. So we've got a copilot that allows our customers to interact with our technology, solves problems, reduces support calls for them, makes sure they can get their provisioning and run up and running faster. So as you'd expect a good intelligent capability to enable productivity, have that continue to grow that it's called rv. Then the next step is making sure that AI apps do what we talked about, AI apps as they evolve inside of the enterprise, as they start taking shape and truly taking shape, that we are able to do for those AI apps what we've done for other stacks over time. And that starts with getting the component right. Do I really have the best capability on vector databases? Do I have the best capability around LLMs? Am I protecting the right way? Forget the hype cycle, it's about the data. And are we doing what we need to do to help customers as they build those apps and be one step ahead of them to assist them through that process. The third and in no particular order is where I think we could add a ton of value and continue to do a lot of our good R & D in is recovery, recovery, recovery. Okay. When you need to recover, you tend to have less information than more. What happened? Was it a breach? What did it take? How did they get in? They're still there. So you're, you're simultaneously trying to bring your business back to life while doing forensics around those things. So for us to be able to use AI to truly give customers a prescriptive or a pinpointed capability says start here. We think based on what we know, this is pretty good, I'm oversimplifying it, but there's a lot of tough engineering that goes on here that says this is a good place to start. And then enabling that journey for them with clean rooms and active directory automation and you know, AI helping them with the automation pieces of it. So if you think of the layers, you know, there's recovery helping customers truly recover. There is the ability to, you know, to have productivity around it and then actually protect the, the, the, the actual apps itself. Now that's what we kind of are. I'm giving you a 30, 000 foot view where we are today. Come November 12th, we're going to have a whole bunch more stuff that I think will really dazzle. I can't get everything away from this right now.

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Patrick Moorhead: You know, I mean you, if you want, you can, you're gonna have to have me back.

Daniel Newman: Okay, We're Good with it. We'll make sure we let your team know that you've requested to do this again very soon. Interestingly, before I do want to ask you about shift, you sort of teased it earlier. But before I ask you about shifts,, when I talk to CEOs of companies right now, I do love to ask this question. What about AI in terms of your own teams and company? Sure, sure. How much are you seeing that proliferate? Are you seeing productivity efficiency gains? And how much are you pushing utilization of these tools inside, Inside convo?

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Sanjay Mirchandani: You know, it's a question. I don't think I have a staff meeting without that sort of topic coming, coming together. So we, I bifurcated very simply because I like to keep it that way, which is AI for Commvault and Commvault for AI. All right, so we talked about Commvault for AI, how we're using it, how we're building things to enable AI protection and so on within customers and partners. The other way around, when you're looking at it, you know, every one of my execs has a mandate to really go embrace the tooling, go experiment, go do sandboxing and figure it out. Now then, the metrics are great. Oh, you know, I did this faster, I translated that better, or I supported that quicker or. But over time, and I say over time, I mean, in short order, we need to have real metrics, and we've got a lot of work going on internally that says, this is truly driving productivity. This is truly driving efficiency. That's what we're looking for. But with every single executive, as we go into the new year, we're gonna, we're gonna have very defined metrics as part of it. I like to say you're gonna have humans and you're gonna have agents. Yeah. And you gotta have to figure out how your, what your workforce looks like in unison, in, you know, togetherness. Because it's not one or the other, or you can't be rash about it. You've got to think about it, because there's maturity here. You need maturity. It's not everything just doesn't work the way you hope it works. There's a curve of maturity, and, and we're fully aware of it. So, so, yes, make it part of your, your, your core objectives as an executive. Start experimenting, sandboxing, learning, measuring. And then as we go into the new fiscal year, for us, really having a point of view on what your business plan looks like.

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Daniel Newman: I appreciate you answering that. So I'll give you the little moment of a sweet promotion of an exciting event you have coming up, the shift event. We tend to talk around this each year and it's coming up again here in the fall. And from what I can see, it looks like you've got the sort of who's who of the hyperscalers, some of the biggest infra companies. You've got energy players coming to show, you've got integrators coming in. I see names AWS, Microsoft Worldwide Tech, Deloitte, HPE, Pure Storage, Constellation. I mean, big names, big companies all coming. So what are the big themes that are driving all these partners, sponsors and customers to the events?

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Sanjay Mirchandani: So, you know, guys, it's, it's, you know, we kind of do a big annual unveiling of the new platform, new capabilities, new direction. So there's a lot of that, there's going to be a lot of, hey, this is the, this is the stuff we've been building and coming out with. But there's also, you know, we're also looking at a, there's also a mindset internally that how does, how does cyber resilience or resilience in general evolve in, in the era of AI? And we're, you know, we're in the early days of adoption, we're in the early days of measurement, in the early days of protection. And what should we be thinking of? As if I was a customer, what would I want to know? And you're going to see a lot of deep understanding in the world of humans and agents and AI and how stuff's going to change and how, and how are we going to, how do you think about true resilience in that world? So another way to think about it is maybe the evolution from cyber resilience to AI resilience. You know, that there's going to be a ton of great new technology releases, great partnership releases. You know, how are we partnering? Because this is not, this is a team sport. And last quarter I had quite a few partner announcements in my, in my commentary because we've been working really hard at making sure that customers have trusted partners that can build on our platform. So be it the Kyndryls, be it the Deloittes, be it the HPE’s, and you know, really making sure that their capabilities really dovetail nicely with what we're delivering on a platform. And so it's going to be a lot of that. There's going to be, you know, headliners from partners, hyperscalers, also partners, customers, you know, and other types of partnerships that will be announced there.

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Daniel Newman: Well, it sounds like a really exciting event.

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Patrick Moorhead: Sure.

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Daniel Newman: Obviously all of you out there listening. Definitely check it out. This will be a big unveiling moment for Tom Walton. A lot going on there. A lot of innovation. Of course, we've got to play both sides of this. A lot of helping companies prevent all this innovation is delivering to the bad actors out there. Right. We've got to keep it great to spend time with you. Thank you so much for coming back. Sorry that we told you a little bit about our workouts so you can come back, maybe we'll get to hear a little bit about yours. But we hope you have a great year, a great continued course, great upcoming event and we definitely want to see you again soon.

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Sanjay Mirchandani: Thank you. Thank you both.

Patrick Moorhead: Thanks.

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Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for being part of this Six Five webcast virtual edition. We appreciate you being here. Stick with us, subscribe, be part of our community. Check out all of the great episodes here on the Six Five. You got to go for now. We'll see you all later.

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