There's a lot going on in the data protection and cyber security markets - it can be hard to keep up with all the news. That's where The Competitive Corner's Newsletter comes in, to help curate and distill the most pertinent movers and shakers each month to make your job easier.
November was a surprisingly quiet month with some news from #Commvault, #ObjectFirst, and #Cohesity. Below you'll find a breakdown of why these news items matter to you, links to the original articles, and related blogs for further research and insights.
November 2024 Competitive Headlines:
(click any headline to jump directly to the analysis)
Commvault Announces Fiscal 2025 Second Quarter Financial Results
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
Last week Commvault announced their Q2 Financial Results, beating the street with a 4th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth of 16% to $233M for the quarter. SaaS revenues have grown 64% YoY and now contribute over $215M in ARR to Commvault's total of $853M overall ARR. So, the SaaS business itself is healthy and makes up ~25% of the recurring revenue.
Subscription revenues were also up ~37% YoY and are contributing about 50% to the overall quarterly revenue - which means there's quite a few Commvault customers still in a CAPEX model. With FY25 total revenues projected around $958M, Commvault has set a very realistic goal of finally crossing the $1B ARR milestone in FY26.
For those interested in more details around the Commvault Q2 results, they have published a Q2’25 Earnings Presentation summarizing the results and providing some additional insights on the quarter.
Object First Achieves 347% Year-Over-Year Increase in Total Bookings in Q3 2024
[Link to Original Article ]
Why it Matters?
For some reason, people are still buying backup appliances that ONLY work with Veeam, but don't let these big numbers (347% growth in BOOKINGS YoY!?) fool you...
Going back to Q1 of FY25, Object First reported an 822% growth in BOOKINGS (which is not revenue) and that they had 57 new deployments that quarter (up 714% YoY). So, working backwards that means they only really had deployed 8 units in Q1 of FY24 - and when you're dealing with very small numbers, any changes will appear significant comparatively. In Q2 of FY25, Object First claimed another 600% growth in bookings YoY, which brings us to this latest quarter at 347% YoY. As stated before, bookings does not equate to revenues, and when you have a product as insecure as Veeam, the Ootbi backup appliance can certainly look like an "easy button" for many SMB and MID clients.
Remember, having to build, secure, scale, and maintain a Veeam solution is not a “set and forget” task, there is a lot of ongoing care needed to keep it running and even to make sure the backup copies remain secured and immutable. The Object First solution is looking to take advantage of that
complexity by providing an “easy button” for the backup storage piece. However, this still adds to the overall TCO, so always be sure to ask any and every Veeam customer “What else are you running with Veeam?”
Cohesity CEO Updates On Veritas Acquisition, IPO And Becoming A $2B Company
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
The SPoonen PR roadshow continues with this latest update from the Cohesity CEO on the Veritas deal. Surprisingly, there was actually some "new" information to garner from the interview!
First off it was revealed that the remnants of the Veritas portfolio not acquired by Cohesity will be known apparently as "Arctera". The new "Arctera" will include all the solutions left behind which are not insignificant: Backup Exec, InfoScale, Enterprise Vault, and the core compliance business solutions. These are successful in the industry in their own right and may benefit from not having
NetBackup a part of the stack.
In addition to just getting a name for the spin-off, it looks like Sanjay tipped his hat to part of their enterprise strategy: Many existing Veritas NetBackup customers in the enterprise and Fortune 100 are running NetBackup with DataDomain backends. It looks like Cohesity's plan is to attack those DataDomain clients and replace that storage target with Cohesity as a NAS backup storage target. This certainly seems logical (NetBackup + Cohesity will both be 1st party products) as it pushes out a Cohesity competitor, but it will require some engineering from Cohesity as currently the Cohesity appliance is NOT a very good backup target. However, it is likely that they are building an OST connector (similar to DD Boost type integrations) so that the Veritas NBU servers can leverage the native source-side dedupe capabilities of the Cohesity appliance.
Next, Sanjay mentioned their many joint connectors for workload support - including apparently Jira Services. Now, none of the current Cohesity, NetBackup, or NetBackup SaaS Data Protection solutions support Jira backup today so this might have been a glimpse into their roadmap.
In terms of broader market strategy, Sanjay disclosed Cohesity's focus on the enterprise market first and foremost with midmarket coming along for the ride, but the focus would be on enterprise. He also discussed pushing more and more professional services to the channel. The IPO question of course always lingers, and the Cohesity CEO simply stated they would re-evaluate their plans on that front as the "IPO is not the destination, but a milestone" in their company journey.
Written by Matt Tyrer. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.
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