Technology Reseller - v17 2019

technolog y reseller.co.uk 23 INTERVIEW Technology Reseller finds out more about fast growing hyperconverged secondary storage company Cohesity from EMEA Channel Manager Johannes Kunz Technology Reseller (TR): Cohesity’s technology is often described as disruptive. In what ways is this so? Johannes Kunz (JK): The easiest way to explain this is to use an iPhone analogy. Before the iPhone, you had a camera, a telephone, an address book, an alarm clock. Then the iPhone consolidated everything onto one platform. This made things much easier for the user; it enabled them to be more productive; and it made the sharing of information much easier than it was seven, eight, nine years ago. You can apply the same analogy to Cohesity and secondary storage, which is where we focus our efforts. In this area, there are a lot of silos. There are different kinds of backup, in Cohesity is making waves as a disruptive start-up in the management of secondary data operations, such as backups, disaster recovery, file services, object storage, test/dev, archives and analytics. Founded in June 2013 by former Nutanix co-founder and Google lead developer Mohit Aron, Cohesity addresses the cost and complexity of secondary data sprawl and infrastructure silos by consolidating all secondary data and apps onto a single, hyperconverged, webscale data platform spanning on-premise infrastructure, the cloud and remote or branch offices. Through the Cohesity DataPlatform and associated solutions, Cohesity helps organisations tackle data fragmentation and improve security, productivity and data insight by creating a global secondary data store with ‘single pane of glass’ management. A recent study by Vanson Bourne found that more than one third of organisations use six or more solutions for secondary data operations, such as backups, disaster recovery, file services, object storage, test/ dev, archives and analytics. Of these, 10% use 11 or more. Cohesity is enjoying rapid growth. Over the last five quarters, it has more than quadrupled its customer base in EMEA and increased revenues by 365%. It reports ‘exceptional’ growth in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland and in key verticals, including financial services, the public sector and healthcare. Further expansion is on the cards after Cohesity raised an additional $250 million in June 2018, bringing total equity raised to $410 million. The Series D funding round was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, with strong participation from strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investors including Sequoia Capital. Technology Reseller spoke to Cohesity EMEA Channel Manager Johannes Kunz to find out more about the company’s proposition, its channel strategy and its global expansion plans. many cases with different vendors, for different use cases; then you have NAS files; you have archives; you have a test/ dev environment; you have cloud gateways. All this is extremely complex to manage and, in most cases, very inefficient. You end up with a lot of dark data in this environment – data that people don’t know exists. That is expensive and not easy to manage. We come in and consolidate all these secondary storage silos and the whole management of them onto a hyperconverged webscale platform. We eliminate storage silos and simplify data management: we have a search engine; we give the customer access to their data; and we make it very, very efficient, with simple management and, of course, user gateways into the cloud – Amazon, Google or Microsoft – for peering archiving applications and so on. TR: How big a problem is secondary storage in modern enterprises? JK: Primary storage – high performance storage that you need for mission-critical applications – makes up about 20%-30% of all storage in a company. This is where Pure Storage plays and Nutanix plays and EMC with its storage. All the rest – 70%- 80% of all storage – is secondary storage. This is back-up; archiving; data on the Single minded Then, there is scalability. Scaling with silos is a big, big problem, but with Cohesity, enterprises can scale out very, very easily Continued... Johannes Kunz 1