John Tavares is Vice President, Global Channel and Alliances at Commvault, a recognised global enterprise software leader in the management of data across cloud and on-premises environments. He speaks about how his company works with channel partners and about the latest trends, which he sees emerging across the channel.
Describe your current job role and the parts that are somewhat challenging?
In my role as VP, Global Channel and Alliances, my main focus is overseeing Commvault’s Global Partner Organisation – helping it to grow and strengthening the company’s working relationships with its partners across the globe. Across our partner organisation, everything we do ties back to Commvault’s strong reputation for providing trusted, enterprise-grade data management solutions across the global channel, and that’s something that I’m very proud of!
The most challenging part is expanding on the incredible momentum that the Partner Organisation has generated throughout 2020 – I want to continue developing meaningful partnerships while enhancing our technical support for partners.
Can you explain how your company works with channel partners?
Commvault works with a wide range of partners around the world and all in various capacities. Some partners offer Commvault solutions on their marketplaces, while others resell our technology in complete solutions, combining software and hardware or they may offer Metallic, Commvault’s SaaS-portfolio of backup and recovery solutions.
It’s crucial that my team and I speak to our partners regularly and take their feedback on board to ensure that we’re building strong, lasting relationships with these companies. Whenever we rejuvenate our partner programme, it’s this feedback that is one of the main factors in the changes we make going forwards.
How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market?
Our partners are hugely valuable to us, and so we want to support them in any way we can. In-region support, expansive training and demand generation resources are just some of the ways we work together to help our partners build a future-proof business.
Providing unique intelligent data services is also important. We’ve recently announced extended functionality to Metallic, our Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution, which supports any backup target of choice, whether that’s on-premises, in the cloud or to our HyperScale X appliance. A huge focus for me is to make sure that we are in lockstep with all of our partners on this.
What are the latest trends you see emerging across the channel?
This year we’re going to see innovation and simplification as two key requirements for the channel. As the world is – slowly – starting to come out the other side of the pandemic, there will be high demand on the channel to provide solutions that can best help customers to manage this change. Offerings that are leading the way in Digital Transformation, yet that are simple to implement and simple to use, will be top of the priority list for channel partners, as customers will be looking for a smooth transition to the next ‘new normal’.
With this in mind, the onus is on us to help our partners understand the market and how it is evolving from data protection to intelligent data services. This shift will dramatically increase both our and our partners’ target market to a US$42 billion industry by 2024.
What is your management philosophy?
Having a clearly defined management philosophy is critical to my leadership of Commvault’s Global Partner Organisation and our joint success with our partners. I rely on nine key principles that guide all of my decisions:
● Always have the team’s and partners’ best interests in mind and heart
● Have a plan and keep it simple
● Communicate it literally
● Provide context and seek candid feedback
● Be visible
● Ensure healthy candor – seek it
● Be humble
● Positive energy
● Have fun, life is short
When you look back at your career what has been the most memorable achievement?
A large milestone in my career has been my involvement in building EMC, now Dell EMC’s partner foundation. We started from scratch and grew it into a multi-billion-dollar partner-centric storage business.
What made you think of a career in technology?
Growing up, I’ve always had a passion for technology. During college, I studied finance and marketing and as I graduated and looked at my first career move, it was clear to me it would be in technology, combining my passion for that field with my strong education. I started with EMC very soon after graduation and had the opportunity to grow with the company for over 25 years.
What do you think will be the hot technology talking point of 2021?
Software-as-a-Service models and intelligent data services will be the biggest trends we’re going to see this year in technology. If the pandemic has taught our industry anything, it’s that customers need solutions that are as flexible as they themselves are in the current situation. Being able to easily sign up to a solution, have it ready to use almost instantly and have the ability to scale this up and down, whenever required, is a game changer.
We recently discussed this during our FutureReady Investor Event and urge all readers to listen in, as we discussed intelligent data services and the latest trends for 2021.
What are your personal interests and where do you like to spend most of your time after work?
My wife is a professional NASCAR driver and supporting her at races takes up a lot of my spare time. Both her and I are also pursuing our pilot’s licences and in our downtime, we enjoy a range of activities in the mountains of North Carolina.