Commvault earnings: Sales gain ahead of product launches
Commvault Systems is inching back toward profitability after another strong quarter of growth as it continues to build out its business beyond its traditional data backup model. The company’s leaders identified the ability to land more and larger Commvault software deals as the key to greater growth.
Commvault generated $166 million in total revenue for the first 2018 fiscal quarter. That represents a 9% year-over-year increase and is essentially flat sequentially compared to the $172.9 million in total revenue from the previous quarter. Commvault software revenue came in at $74.8 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year and down 4% sequentially.
The company cut its quarterly loss to $284,000 compared to the $2.6 million loss in the same quarter last year.
“We have successfully recast Commvault and repositioned our business to regain our momentum,” said CEO Bob Hammer on the Commvault earnings call last week.
Hammer said Commvault’s enterprise deals increased 10% year-over-year, with the average enterprise deal size ticking up 4% to approximately $282,000 for the quarter. “Our ability to achieve our growth objectives is dependent on a steady flow of $500,000 and $1 million plus deals,” Hammer said.
Brian Carolan, Commvault’s chief financial officer, said enterprise deals of more than $100,000 represented 63% of the Commvault software revenue.
Commvault earnings foreceasts include copy management, hyper-convergence
Hammer provided a preview of Commvault software additions due to launch this year. He cited web-scale appliances for the midmarket and enhancements in active copy management, which targets orchestration for complex tasks for databases and application workloads so they can be ported between tiers of on-premises and cloud storage. This is considered critical for disaster recovery and development-test environments.
On the previous Commvault earnings call in May, Hammer discussed the company’s intention to deliver hyper-converged reference architectures for secondary storage along with an enhanced platform for the cloud, new service offerings for endpoints and Commvault managed services. It also intends to enhance its flagship Commvault Data Platform with business analytics.
“Early this fall, we plan to complement our enterprise web-scale hyper-converged solutions with Commvault web-scale appliances for the midmarket,” Hammer said. “These solutions will be fully indexed copies for backup data protection, snapshot, replication, and archive and copy management. They will have instant data accessibility, and be highly orchestrated for workload portability across hybrid IT with higher functionality, security and scalability.”
Al Bunte, the company’s chief operating officer, said Commvault is “packaging some software and some services together” that will help customers address the General Data Protection Regulation deadline in 2018.
“Obviously, it will first hit the European theaters, primarily enterprise accounts, and that will happen between now and our GO conference in November,” Bunte said on the Commvault earnings call.