CommVault's Sunny News

It could only be described as a PR coup: CommVault gleefully announced yesterday that Sun will resell its Simpana 7.0 series software worldwide, with a particular emphasis on enterprise customers using 64-bit Sun servers and storage for Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange.

The announcement, aptly timed just before CommVault's earnings report next week, shows CommVault's intent to push hard on Simpana, emphasizing its non-backup-and-recovery elements like content management, single-instance storage, and search modules.

That push is something analyst Tom Curlin of RBC Capital Markets noted back in October. Here's a quote from Curlin's Halloween note, which coincided with CommVault's last earnings report:

Dave West, VP of marketing and business development at CommVault, acknowledges that the Sun arrangement is a reseller one, not an OEM agreement like CommVault has with Dell or HDS. Further, CommVault is staying tightly focused on a particular niche. Its new Remote Operations Management Service, also announced this week, won't be included.Sun, contacted for comment on the deal, did not respond at press time, but the vendor also has a long-standing reseller agreement with Symantec. Still, the value of this deal to CommVault can't be underestimated. In these tight-fisted times, the pressure's on to make the most of various data protection combinations in order to maximize sales, particularly among large customers who still have a budget.

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