The pandemic presented an inflection point for cloud – similar to how the financial crisis of 2008 acted as a catalyst for consolidation technologies including the ramp of virtualisation.
Remote working and the attractiveness of SaaS have driven a culture shift which looks like it may stick around, even after Covid-19 threats become less so. IT teams are now questioning their need to run physical data centres as the confidence in cloud has increased due to necessary shifts made to hosted apps and data to keep businesses operating.
At the same time, enterprises can’t simply rip and replace their existing data centre investments in favour of cloud. Not every workload is ripe for the Cloud, and we’ve seen businesses now really seek to understand their data requirements before making a decision to move to cloud. So, instead they’ve embraced the hybrid cloud model.
This in turn has exacerbated the challenge of data fragmentation whereby data copies sit in siloes and often in unknown places! This hampers organisations’ ability to effectively utilise or derive insight from their data. Businesses are under immense pressure to effectively address the management of data – not just in the cloud or in their data centre, but also on the devices of employees who now work remotely and in branch office locations.
This is where Cohesity comes in, says Gregg Petersen, regional director – MEA at Cohesity.
“Through a single, intuitive platform we empower enterprises to manage all their data, whether it resides in Azure, AWS, private clouds, branch locations, or remote devices. And our as-a-Service solutions launched this summer can be up and running in minutes or hours versus days. The big learning for businesses post-Covid-19 is simplicity and ease of use is so vitally important, and thankfully that is one of our strengths.”
Petersen joined Cohesity in August 2021 and will work closely with channel and ecosystem partners as customers in the MEA region embrace modern, cloud-native data management solutions. In an exclusive with ITP.net, Petersen reveals his plans to expand the company’s partner ecosystem and drive robust growth.
What are some unique ways Cohesity’s channel strategy differs from the norm?
Cohesity is a 100% partner focused company. Our partner ecosystem is the centre of our go-to-market strategy. Mike Houghton, VP Global Partner Organisation leads a united global partner organisation, which has many benefits, including allowing us to increase our sales speed and velocity; increase our agility and ability to respond to customer needs; and be easy to do business with operational and sales efficiency.
As a next-gen data management firm, we already have a very robust ecosystem of partners. We’ve also found that the majority of our customer opportunities involve two or more partners be they resellers, alliance or managed service providers. The more we can connect these partners in the field, the better we’ll be able to serve our customers. Cohesity has a very focused partner strategy, which sees us value quality relationships versus a high quantity. We only invest in partners who show commitment and invest in Cohesity, in the support of our mutual customers, and in the past 12 months have delivered new training, enablement, support and incentive programs to support our partners’ success.
What are your plans for growing Cohesity’s channel operations? What is the biggest change that you want to bring to the business?
Cohesity prides itself on empowering our partners with a land and expand approach. Our broad portfolio allows the channel to maintain its existing relationships with vendors yet provide customers with an opportunity to remove data management challenges in an already data fragmented environment.
The first thing we are doing locally in Middle East is to strengthen our distribution network in the region. This will give us extra capabilities and reach, creating a stronger foundation to invest in the channel and bring scale while also enabling partners in the various countries in the Middle East. By using our long-standing and trusted relationships, we bring credibility and trust to the partner community in the region, which are core pillars of how Cohesity does business globally.
What sort of investment is Cohesity putting behind partner training and enablement?
Cohesity has made a substantial investment globally in its partner training and enablement program. The Cohesity Academy includes a dedicated partner catalogue that includes self-paced courses, virtual instructor-led training, on-site instructor-led training and dedicated private training available to our partners.
We also launched Cohesity Credentials, which include accreditations and certifications, and it is available to partners to validate individual knowledge and skills. Once achieved, partners receive badges to promote their expertise. Credentials are also part of the partner program to progress through different tiers.
Continuing education is delivered to partners in multiple ways such as a monthly Partner Beat and Technical Beat which focus on new product introductions and other drivers of enablement, new courses, videos, and micro-training courses.
Targeted training aligns with unique initiatives such as sales campaigns (called Go Green) and other programs such as an Authorized Professional Service program with key requirements for both training and certification. And, we don’t intend to stop there.
Partners our integral to our business, so we are always looking at ways to improve and help our partners and have created more feedback opportunities for partners to tell us how we can help them more.
What challenges do enterprises encounter while trying to achieve agility in a hybrid cloud environment?
With a growing number of mission-critical workloads being migrated to cloud environments, the hybrid cloud model calls for rethinking of disaster recovery. Through 2022, the industry can expect some impressive cloud-native solutions being brought to market by Cohesity. Among these is powerful disaster recovery between hyperscalers. Our intention is to give our customers true freedom of choice, and the ability to leverage the unique strength of each cloud services provider.
Another huge challenge enterprises face is the security of their data. Exploding data growth and mass data fragmentation—the dependence upon multiple point-products for backup spanning across different sprawling silos—have combined to widen organisations’ attack surface. With research showing that every 11 seconds, an organisation falls victim to a ransomware attack it’s more important than ever for businesses to have a robust ransomware mitigation strategy.
Cohesity’s unified solution for connecting infrastructure, workloads, and backup locations arms organisations against ransomware by eliminating mass data fragmentation. In parallel, our comprehensive anti-ransomware solution protects, isolates, detects, and most importantly, rapidly recovers to reduce downtime and ensure business continuity.
What separates Cohesity from its competitors, both in terms of product offering and go to market strategy?
Companies have been relying on either legacy and deeply complex systems for decades, what they really need and want is a simpler and cost-effective data management platform that enables them to do more with their data.
We believe the legacy data management industry has failed to deliver the solution needed by today’s digital businesses.
Cohesity offers next-gen data management that offers simplicity at scale, is cyber resilient by design, and harnesses the power of AI. Our next-gen data management platform helps customers reduce data silos and solve mass data fragmentation, detect, and protect their data from ransomware, and derive greater value from their data — all through one UI.
Without a next-gen data management platform, organisations will continue to grapple with the challenges of complexity (impacting IT teams and TCO), increased cyber risk, along with challenges in deriving value from data.
While we feel good about the progress we’ve made, we are not stopping here. We are obsessed with delighting our customers and we will continue to do that moving forward, and we have some very exciting solutions coming for Middle East businesses and government organisations, that will continue to solve their biggest IT headaches.
