‘Data protection is on top of everyone’s minds’ – US firm Commvault

US data protection and security solutions provider Commvault sees growing opportunities for its business in Latin America as data threats and vulnerabilities are more common than ever in the post-pandemic environment.

“Data protection is now on top of everyone’s mind,” Allan Timchuk, Commvault’s Americas VP for international sales, told BNamericas. “We will continue our engagements in the region and we're looking at accelerated growth, because the opportunity exists.”

During the first eight months of 2022, some 817mn cyberattacks were attempted in Latin America, according to Kaspersky's 2022 Threat Outlook.

This is the highest volume for the period since the record levels seen in 2020, when pandemic-driven fully remote work opened a window of opportunity for attacks. After a drop in 2021, the number of regional attacks increased again in 2022.

Brazil was the country that suffered the most attacks in the first eight months of last year, with the equivalent of 1,554 attempts per minute, Kaspersky reported.

Ransomware groups have gained momentum and are expected to keep IT security executives up at night in 2023 and extortion is expected to be a growing problem for businesses across all industries, particularly those with critical systems.

One of Commvault's main customers now is the power group Enel. In 2020, the Italian multinational was twice hit by attacks, by two different ransomwares, leading it to change its security provider.

"Using Commvault's single platform, we are able to proactively monitor and assess risks, mitigate cyber threats to the business, and protect all workloads, including kubernetes, in multi-clouds, reducing our opex by up to 40% compared to the previous solutions," Bruno Bianchini, Enel’s head of infrastructure & technological services, said in a Commvault release.

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. According to Gartner, by 2025, 85% of global enterprises will be running containerized applications in production.

Bruno Lobo, Commvault's CEO for Latin America, told BNamericas that the company has more than 5,000 clients in the region in different verticals, including energy. Brazil and Mexico are its main markets, he said.

Without providing figures, Timchuck said that Commvault has seen “consistent growth” in the region and that the company expects “even more growth” given the high demand for data protection from customers. 

"Because data, in general, is growing by an annual average of 20% CAGR [compound annual growth rate], the problem continues to expand exponentially," argued Timchuck. "It's not a matter of if an organization will be compromised, but when and how will they deal with that."

Despite the overall positive outlook for the region, Commvault’s preliminary global results for its third fiscal quarter of 2023, ended December 31, indicate that revenues were down 4% to US$195mn, with a net loss of US$310,000.

“As customers and prospects continue to grapple with an uncertain outlook, we experienced slower than expected buying patterns and close rate execution. As a result, we saw a pullback in orders in December, particularly in our Americas software business,” Commvault's president and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said in a statement.

Software and product revenue reached US$89.6mn, down 9% year-on-year, due to a weaker than forecast enterprise market and execution on close rates.

Nevertheless, the company’s services revenue grew by 2%, and annualized recurring revenue (ARR) increased 14%, driven by the group's flagship Metallic cloud-based platform.