Commvault has hired Cisco Systems and HP veteran Wenceslao Lada as VP of worldwide alliances. Considering Lada's title, he apparently succeeds Andy Vandeveld, a Veeam veteran who was Commvault's VP of worldwide alliances and service providers from January through June 2018.
Vandeveld confirmed to ChannelE2E that he's taking a career break. (We look forward to hearing about his next potential moves.)
Meanwhile, Lada arrives at a key time for Commvault. Amid pressure from shareholders, the storage company is seeking a new CEO to succeed N. Robert Hammer. It's a safe bet the backup company would like to announce that new CEO leader during or before the Commvault Go 2018 conference in October.
The firm has also reorganized its sales and marketing go-to-market efforts this year, while taking steps to address concerns from activist investor Elliot Management.
Those efforts are designed to help Commvault better serve partners -- though competition from entrenched rivals (i.e., Veeam); multiple startups (i.e., Cohesity, Rubrik), and SMB-MSP players (i.e., Datto and StorageCraft) continues to intensify.
Commvault Hires Wenceslao Lada: Key Goals
Lada’s appointment is designed to strengthen Commvault’s current alliances and develop new partnerships with cloud providers and other enterprise technology industry leaders, the company says.
He reports to Owen Taraniuk, head of worldwide partnerships and market development at Commvault. Taraniuk was promoted to that post in February 2018. In a prepared statement, Taraniuk said:
"Wenceslao is a proven global executive and business leader with more than 20 years of experience of driving results, building and empowering high performance, diverse multicultural teams. We're building a world-class team to lead our routes to market and he will be integral in driving market strategies for Commvault as well as alliance partnerships."
Lada has been a consultant since November 2016. Earlier, he held VP positions at Cisco Systems and the former Hewlett-Packard. In a prepared statement today, Lada said:
"Based on direct feedback from partners, Commvault has improved all aspects of partner engagement in an effort to simplify, streamline and scale their business to take full advantage of the growing opportunities with customers. I'm excited to be a part of the company's strategic goal to scale the global partner program, drive growth through a focused route-to-market approach, and bring to market new and unique joint solution offerings that increase value to partners and customers."
Commvault CEO Search and Financial Results
Meanwhile, there’s been little-to-no noise about potential successors for Hammer. For its Q1 of fiscal 2019, Commvault's revenue was $176.2 million, up 6.2 percent vs. the corresponding quarter last year. The company in July announced "new, simplified product, pricing, and packaging that makes it easier than ever before to buy, implement and sell Commvault solutions," the company said at the time.
Additional reporting by Joe Panettieri.
