US' Commvault bullish on data protection, management biz in Chinese market

Commvault, a United States-based data protection and management company, sees big opportunities in China, as a wide range of sectors accelerate steps to embrace digital transformation in the world's second-largest economy.

The comments came after the company managed to record fast growth in China, one of its most important markets, in 2021, despite fallouts from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Liu Wei, president of Commvault China, said as online services such as remote work continue gaining momentum, there is a greater demand for data protection in the long term.

"Meanwhile, sectors such as finance, new energy, manufacturing, education and healthcare also accelerated the push to embrace digital transformation in China. And these industries attach higher importance to data protection than other sectors," Liu said.

To better meet such demand, the US company is investing heavily into areas where it has an edge, such as database solutions. "We believe that data is not just for storage and protection. It also has to be used (to generate more value). We offer rich tools for better utilizing data," Liu said.

Data from market research company International Data Corp showed that Commvault is the only foreign company that recorded double-digit growth－22.4 percent year-on-year growth－in its market share in China's data replication and protection industry last year.

"The Chinese market has maintained a relatively high growth rate, especially in the past year, showcasing the prospects of continued growth in the world's second-largest economy," Liu added.

IDC predicts that China's data replication and protection market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.3 percent over the next five years, reaching $1.22 billion in 2026.

In China, enterprise customers, especially in industries such as transportation and manufacturing, are more willing to buy all-in-one hardware that integrates software for data replication and protection than pure software solutions, with the former accounting for more than 60 percent of the market's sales volume, IDC said.

Amid such context, Liu said Commvault is ratcheting up resources to optimize its all-in-one solutions which are positioned to serve large-scale users with extremely high-performance requirements, especially in distributed computing scenarios.

A distributed computer system consists of multiple software components that are on multiple computers but run as a single system.

"We are dedicated to helping Chinese companies go global and foreign companies better succeed in China," Liu said, adding that the company has close partnerships with a string of cloud computing service providers such as Alibaba Cloud to help different sectors adopt digital technologies.

Market research company Gartner named Commvault a leader in its 2022 report for enterprise backup and recovery software solutions.

Noting the increasing challenges that IT organizations are facing, such as ransomware attacks, rampant data proliferation and rising security threats, Commvault said companies need offerings that not only protect against these threats but also detect them before they happen.

Wu Hequan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said as digital technologies get increasingly intertwined with both society and the economy, there is an urgent need to better protect and manage data.