‘We’re opening up data with them so that data pipelines can be easily consumed. So we’re engineering together. A lot of the dust will settle in time as to how exactly these apps start being built, but we’re on the ground with them, be it in the cloud or on-premises or some combination thereof, to make sure that things are happening,’ Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani tells CRN.
Commvault, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, has over time become one of the top providers of data protection and management technology across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. Its strength shone Wednesday when it reported full fiscal 2026 revenue of $1.18 billion, up 19 percent over last year, with annual recurring revenue of $1.12 billion, up 21 percent.
Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, in an exclusive interview with CRN, attributed that growth to a steadfast focus on data resiliency and on the company’s proactive embrace of AI for customers and internal operations.
For customers, Mirchandani said, Commvault now supports essential AI app components—vector databases, PaaS layers, data streams and agentic capabilities—enabling enterprise adoption of AI while ensuring robust data protection, with AI threaded throughout the product to enhance usability and self-sufficiency.
[Related: Commvault CEO Mirchandani: We Are A Resilience Company In The Era Of AI]
Internally, Mirchandani described his personal commitment to deploying AI within Commvault, positioning the company as “customer zero” for its own technology.
“Within Commvault, I’ve taken on the AI deployment for the company internally as a personal CEO-level mandate,” he said. “I’ve got one of my senior executives working closely with me and the rest of the company and the rest of the executive team to prioritize how we deploy AI within the company with safe guardrails.”
Mirchandani also addressed rumors about a possible sale of the company by calling it “rumors” and reaffirming Commvault’s dedication to sustainability, innovation and customer-centricity, all with an eye on its priority of being a reliable long-term partner for customers, maintaining readiness to respond to crises and continuing to invest in R&D.
Here is more of Mirchandani’s conversation with CRN.
How do you define Commvault today?
By the way, 30 years this month as a company and we’ve always been in the business of protecting our customers’ data. It’s been called different things over the years, but at the heart of it, we take what we do very seriously, which is bringing our customers back to life if something bad happens. Different things were considered bad. Now it’s cyber and other kinds of threats, but in the end, it’s about making our customers resilient, making their businesses resilient, and that’s what we do. That’s our focus. And we’ve stayed pretty close to that over the years.
This quarter’s financial results look very good. What’s behind the growth?
The first thing is that the strategy we’ve put together is working. So whether you look at the top-line growth, at the ARR [annual recurring revenue] pivot we’ve made, the SaaS growth of 42 percent on an ARR basis—we clip at $400 million on SaaS—EBITDA, free cash flow, stock buybacks, it was a great quarter because what we’re doing is working from an execution point of view. No. 2, the platform that we have is the industry leader now, whether you take my word for it or you look at the industry pundits who read these things. We’ve been in the top right-hand corner of every quadrant for decades, and we work very hard to stay there. And three … we believe AI is actually a tailwind for us. Resilience becomes such an important part of AI being able to bring back systems should something go sideways because data is the heart of IT. And when you look at those three factors, and the elevation of resilience in the new world order, I think that those three coming together demonstrate the kind of results that we saw.
Speaking about AI, how has the rise of AI impacted Commvault both in terms of what you’re doing for your customers and what the company is doing internally?
Let me take the customer perspective first. The product Commvault for AI, what are we doing there? No. 1, in the platform, we’ve been building out support for all the components that build AI apps: vector databases, PaaS layers, data streams and agentic capabilities. Really bringing to life the things customers are using to start assembling AI-based applications in the enterprise. We’re making sure we have the widest support for the pieces that they use. No. 2, we’ve threaded AI throughout the entire product so that at any given point, customers can use our AI icon so the AI suggests what to do next. For example, we built an amazing discovery module that tells customers, ‘Hey, we discovered all this data is unprotected, but it looks just like that data. Do you want us to apply your policy on this data?’ Previously, you have to go hunt and peck for it. Today we know what looks like what. What isn’t protected? And how do you get protected? So we’ve threaded capabilities throughout the product to enable customers to be more self-sufficient, for the product to be self-provisioning, to add new workloads. All of that is built in. And the third piece is really about building agentic capabilities into the product. For example, we’ve released a library of agents that allows customers to invoke different capabilities in our product. ‘Hey, give me a recovery agent. Hey, give me a policy agent. Hey, give me an identity agent.’ And so we’re giving customers access to MCP [Model Context Protocol] servers. They can access all the agentic capabilities in our product. We’ve also said, ‘Oh, you’ve got petabytes of data with us, and we’re the only ones who can bring data from every source in your company, apply intelligence to it as we back it up, and then store and secure it for you. Why don’t you use it for your data pipelines? Why don’t you use it for your testing? Why don’t you use it in your sandbox?’ We provide a singular policy engine that then says, ‘Yep, let’s give you access to this data set for a week, mask all the personal data and all the other confidential stuff so you can go build his pipeline and test your models.’ So within the product is support for all the elements of the AI and agentic capabilities threaded right through the product for more usability.
How about within Commvault?
Within Commvault, I’ve taken on the AI deployment for the company internally as a personal CEO-level mandate. I’ve got one of my senior executives working closely with me and the rest of the company and the rest of the executive team to prioritize how we deploy AI within the company with safe guardrails. We’re ‘customer zero’ for our own technology. And in that capacity, what we’re doing, and I’ll oversimplify it by parsing it into two parts. One is giving all our 3,300 employees access to world-class generative AI tooling so they can do their jobs better, smarter, faster, more productively, in a safe way. That’s rolling out as we speak. On the other side, I put a crack team together, a ‘SWAT’ team together that’s helping business leaders like Geoff Haydon, our new president of customer and field operations; like Anna Griffin, our chief marketing officer; and others in my senior team to take their top priorities from an automation, agentic, productivity point of view and find ways to quickly put this into enterprise-grade deployments, build and deploy, and then take all that learning and share it with customers. We’re trying to be a bit of a fishbowl for our customers ourselves as we deploy internally with our own customer zero capabilities, and on the other side, making sure our product is best of breed for all things AI as customers embark on that journey from a data resilience point of view.
Reuters reported a couple weeks ago that Commvault is exploring a possible sale. Is there any light you can shed on that?
No, it’s rumors. I don’t want to fuel it. It’s speculation. What I will say, and I hope you appreciate it, is that we’ve been in business for 30 years doing exactly what we set ourselves up to do, to protect customers’ data and businesses, and we’ve been public for 20 years. And while I know it sounds kind of highfalutin, but what’s really important to us is to be a sustainable company because customers bank their data on us. We want to make sure that we can invest in R&D. We have the right people on the ground. We’ve got the right technology to protect customers. We’ve got the right partnerships to engage with them so that when a customer calls and says, ‘Guys, I’m in trouble,’ which happens every day, it’s not about whether we can’t afford it or we’re not there or the technology is old. No, we jump on it. Our philosophy internally is if a customer is down, we’re down. We want to be around for the next 30 years to help our customers. Look at the numbers: healthy top-line growth, responsible bottom-line growth, 1,600 patents as of January. We take innovation very, very seriously and make sure that we’re there for our customers. That’s what I focus on. Honestly, everything else is rumors or speculation.
How has the Iran war impacted business for Commvault?
I’ve answered that question a few times today. I don’t think the war in particular has had any direct material impact on our business. What we have seen, which is very natural, is customers calling us for, and I’m oversimplifying it, two points of view. One is, ‘Hey, I’d like to make sure I have another copy of this data in another data center,’ or ‘I need to make sure I have another copy in another country, or one of my branch offices, as opposed to where it is today. Can you help me make that happen?’ And we can do it before the sentence is done. The other is they call us because this may be a little more complicated than they thought, and they go, ‘Hey, can you come in and help me test my resilience capabilities to make sure I can actually recover should something bad happen?’ We’ve been helping our customers with that. With both of those scenarios, we have a full complement of teams on the ground, in the Middle East as well as in Israel, and they’re doing what they do. So materially, for our business, it hasn’t had any effect one way or the other. But at times like this, we get closer to the customers to make sure they’re taken care of. And that’s really it.
With the evolution of AI that Commvault is very much a part of, how has that changed how you work with your channel partners?
We have very, very strong relationships with all four hyperscalers. So as customers start out looking at the componentry for their AI apps—what agent model do they want to use, where does it live, where’s the data, where they want host their apps—as they go through those decisions, we make it very easy because we support all four clouds, all four hyperscalers, quite implicitly as well as on-premises. So if you believe hybrid deployments of enterprise AI are going to be a thing, then we’re very well suited to make that happen. Then you look at data, and you look at the way customers want to store the data, process the data, back up the data. And there are some nuances, whether it’s vector databases or other things like that. [In this] we have never been closer to our partners than we are today. We work together on solutions. We’re working together on innovations that they’re coming up with to absorb AI capabilities. We’re opening up data with them so that data pipelines can be easily consumed. So we’re engineering together. A lot of the dust will settle in time as to how exactly these apps start being built, but we’re on the ground with them, be it in the cloud or on-premises or some combination thereof, to make sure that things are happening. Now there’s other elements to AI, like network security capabilities, data security capabilities, making sure that we’re working with the right partners to make sure all of that stuff is also [ready]. We have, I’d say, an invigorated engagement with our partners, at least the kinds that I mentioned. And then you’ve got the SIs [systems integrators] helping build apps, and that continues.
Commvault also recently brought on a new president of customer and field operations and made some other C-suite changes. Talk about that.
Geoff Haydon just joined recently, three weeks now. He was a board member for seven months. The financial community is very pleased to see Gary Merrill back as CFO after we went through the elaborate process of getting his position filled. And Geoff was in the boardroom as I updated them every few days, weeks, whatever because they were part of the process. And then, when we decided Gary was the choice, we started talking about that, and [Geoff] raised his hand and said, ‘I’d love to be part of that.’ Geoff decided it would be more fun to be part of the management team in this next phase. And so he went through the process, and I managed to get everything thankfully lined up for our sales kickoff three weeks ago.
Is president of customer and field operations a new role at Commvault, or was it an existing role?
It’s our first role of this kind. So Geoff has the entire customer life cycle: presales, the actual sales, support, consulting, advanced support capabilities, our customer success unit, sales operations. The entire customer life cycle from concept to repeat sales,
all of it, including the partner side, all the routes to market.
Are acquisitions a big part of your plans going forward?
Yes, we definitely are looking at things to either enhance the platform and/or expand markets. Commvault has only done five acquisitions, all five under my watch. We’ve been careful. We’ve been pointed, and the last two were very good. Satori Cyber, that’s our security play. We’ve integrated it completely into the Commvault Cloud Platform. So that’s working exactly the way we envisioned it. Clumio, which we bought a year before, is really doing well with cloud-native [data protection and cyber resilience]. It was built around AWS and had deep, deep, deep AWS capabilities. Just last week, we announced support for Google Cloud. It now has a parallel set of capabilities for Google. So our acquisitions have been pointed and have so far been good for us. But what we said when we raised the convertible notes back in September was that acquisitions would be part of that capital use when we saw the right thing.
What are your strategic priorities for the rest of 2026?
I try to keep things simple. The Commvault Cloud Unity platform we announced in November has continued to grow, and we’re adding capabilities. … Our goal is to make sure that that product becomes the gold standard for resilience. That’s job one for Geoff and the engineering team and everybody in the company, making sure that when customers think resilience, the natural choice is Commvault Cloud for the breadth and depth of what we do there. And it doesn’t matter if it’s SaaS or on-premises or somewhere in between. We span the breadth of technologies with it.
Second, one of the things we now feel the platform allows us to do in a much easier way is allow customers to use more capabilities seamlessly within the product, or from our point of view, being able to cross-sell more capabilities into more services to a customer that logically work together. For example, our ability to air-gap protect their copy of their data, give them a clean room to test backup data in good times, and give them an Active Directory backup to make sure their identities are the way they should be, and put their automated playbook together for them so when they have to run it at some point, they’ve done it before. What does that mean? That means that they can scan their data better, store their data better, test their data better, and recover their data better, all in with a unified runbook. So making sure that customers are getting the value of the platform based on these kinds of outcomes.
And No. 3, making sure we’re enabling their AI journey from day zero. Whether it’s access to their data, backing up their apps the way they should be, and making sure that as they think about AI and the data that feeds their AI platform that we are front and center from a resilience and enablement capability.
