Commvault is shifting to a partner-led strategy with its latest hire.
Owen Taraniuk is a 25-year technology solutions industry veteran and was recently named head of worldwide partnerships and market development at Commvault, a cloud data management solution company based in New Jersey, US.
In his new role, he will focus on creating and executing the company’s global go-to-market strategy and indirect partnerships. While he’s spent most of his time so far getting to know his global team, his list of immediate priorities includes hiring and garnering new business.
“I’m excited to be at Commvault and to be a part of the changes that we’re bringing about to develop further and go after more opportunity,” he tells CDN. “We’ve got a deep legacy in working with all kinds of partners at scale and my goal is to expand all that. I’m starting to strategize and look at global market expansion, new relationships, new offerings, and how we can get more local by adapting to those markets. My first order of business has been taking stock of what we have, understanding the vision that our CEO and management team have, and how to execute that. We’re also looking to enhance the team further by hiring for new positions.”
Owen Taraniuk
Taraniuk has been with Commvault as vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan since October 2015, and has previously held senior leadership roles in global organizations such as EMC2 Corporation, Kofax Inc., Open Text Corporation, Groupe Inova, ABS Group, and Dun & Bradstreet Software.
Ron Miller, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Commvault, explains in a Jan. 17 press release that Taraniuk’s appointment “signals a strategic shift towards being partner-led with a focus on increasing our investment in alliance and partner relationships whose role in growing and scaling Commvault’s global business is critical in our future plan.”
The company recently teamed up with Cisco to launch a scale-out data protection solution that combines Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) called ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS. Commvault has also joined Cisco’s Solutions Plus program, meaning it is now on Cisco’s Global Price List so resellers can more easily sell and deliver its solutions. Despite not being part of setting up these partnerships, Taraniuk says they are just examples of what’s to come.
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“This is a huge opportunity for Commvault to take the best of what Cisco offers and enhance it for the market and for our customers. I think it represents both a very significant opportunity for Commvault due to the scale and global nature of the relationship, but also as a proof point of what we’re doing with other partners and relationships that we’re setting up at the moment. There will be many more to come,” he adds.
Miller further adds that Taraniuk has an “impeccable track record of success in aligning internal and external teams,” and his natural leadership skills will only elevate Commvault’s worldwide programs.
From a long-term perspective, Taraniuk says his goal is both partner satisfaction and growing the company as it begins to invest heavily in partnerships. He calls channel partners, and particularly value-added resellers, the “life-blood” of Commvault.
“The opportunity in the market is growing exponentially, and we want to be the best vendor of choice for partners to work with. We want them to have simplicity, ease of access and support, highly responsive organization that helps them go after and achieve their goals because they are absolutely vital to us,” Taraniuk explains. “And from an organizational point of view, the longer-term goal is to be able to realize the market potential that’s there, to rapidly achieve the scale we need to be accessing that, and to grow with that market opportunity. So, I see a tremendous opportunity in the coming years for Commvault to continue its 20-year journey, and really grow into a much larger organization on the back of that.”
