CommVault intros Simpana 10 to channel partners in Dubai

Over 100 channel representatives from across Mena and Turkey attended the Meydan Hotel on March 20 and 21. CommVault's top regional sales, marketing and channel executives also participated in sales academies, technical tracks and live demonstrations.

With Simpana 10, all data is consigned to the Content Store and made available to search and repurpose via indexing. The upgrade has additional support for VMware's vCloud Director private cloud management product as well as for hardware snapshots in Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

"Simpana 10 is a real landmark for us," explained Fiona Moon, CommVault's Marketing Director for EMEA. "It's a significant launch, taking us from just being a back-up company to being a real data information management company."

"It's about turning data into information. It's about being able to mine. Our new feature Content Store takes all company data, which Simpana interrogates and makes useful," added Martin Gibbons, CommVault Systems' Director of Channel for EMEA.

Since CommVault work exclusively through the channel, there is certainly an element of educating their partners - not only on the new products, but on the scope of big data itself.

"It's an ongoing process where we as a vendor need to educate our channel partners, and prospective partners about what big data could mean to their customer base," explained Gibbons.

The wants and needs for customers across Mena are on par with other regions, Moon told AMEinfo, though legacy issues tend to be lower than in Europe and North America, because of the public sector into infrastructure. It's a much more holistic approach, not constrained by cost, she said.

"The event comes as a key milestone for us because it combines not only the Simpana 10 launch, which is very important for us, but also there is fun engagement with CommVault in terms of presale, post-sale know-how and knowledge transfer," said Natheer Abu Joudeh, Technical Director for Cell Information Technology - a CommVault channel partner."It also allows us to do some business planning with sales leaders from CommVault,"