Commvault
More info
- Released
- 1996
- Type
- Backup software
- Website
- commvault.com
A backup vendor with roots in Bell Labs that has spent three decades selling the insurance companies remember only once the server is already on fire.
It began in 1988 as a data management group inside Bell Labs, moved to AT&T Network Systems and became an independent New Jersey company in 1996. Its product, long called Simpana, was the archetypal enterprise backup platform: a central server tracking what was copied where, from tape and disk to the cloud.
Competition comes from Veeam, which grew up on virtual machines, and younger Rubrik and Cohesity. All of them now sell the same message: backup as the last line of defence against ransomware. In 2025 Commvault got to demonstrate the risk first-hand, when a nation-state actor got into its Azure environment through a zero-day and reached keys to customers' cloud backups.