CommVault Seems to Have All The Right Buzz Jargon, Analyst Says

The word “virtualization” has been much in the news these days, what with the blowout IPO last week of EMC’s (EMC) tracking stock for its VMware (VMW) software unit. And that’s caused a bump up again in the number of folks chasing anything with a patina of “virtualization,” a term used for the separation via software of files and documents from the physical hardware on which those assets are processed.

Such a piece of software exists at CommVault (CVLT), a company whose bread and butter has been archiving and securing data on collections of corporate disk drives.

The company’s new “Simpana” software supposedly makes it more of a “virtualization” company, in the sense that you can have your data copied to various collections of drives, so your data could be anywhere. Kind of like how VMware lets you run multiple operating systems irrespective of the underlying hardware (kinda, but not really the same thing).

At any rate, in a note Thursday morning, C.E. Unterberg Towbin analyst Gabriel Lowy, who has identified CommVault as a “virtualization” company in recent reports, says that his research shows strong interest in the Simpana product:

Arrow [Electronics (ARW), one of CommVault’s distributors] and inside sales both indicate that existing customers are rapidly looking to upgrade to the broader functionality and that there are “many, many evals” out in field. We continue to believe that with Simpana, CommVault can take this market.

He goes on to describe how the product is a “virtualization” product: “The Simpana 7.0 suite creates a virtual pool of searchable content from files, emails and attachments stored across separate backup using a web-based interface.” That’s important when companies get hauled into court and have to find their files in “discovery” phase of a case, no matter where the e-mail or document in question may be located.

Lowy also says that his checks indicate relatively good capital spending trends among CommVault’s customers in the current quarter: “Several sales calls, including one each
to Dell (DELL) (~20% of CommVault’s sales) and Hitachi (~7% of sales) suggest good linearity with no signs of spending slowdown.

Lowy has a $27 price target on shares of CommVault.

Next Wednesday, CommVault will host its shareholder meeting, details here.