Validating Cohesity software on the Cisco UCS platform adds another route to market in addition to their own partners, and the Cisco deal is unlikely to be the last.
Joe Barnes, Cohesity’s channel chief
Santa Clara CA-based Cohesity has expanded the route to market for its secondary storage offering by signing its first vendor partnering deal, with Cisco. Their offering has been validated for the Cisco UCS platform, and Cohesity has been named a Cisco Certified Solution Partner. Cohesity is also sharing the complete reference architecture for the joint solution.
Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron was a co-founder of Nutanix, and the company has been vocal that its goal is to do the same thing for secondary storage that Nutanix did to primary storage — by using its hyperconverged platform to consolidate all secondary storage functionality on a single platform.
“We are super excited about this partnership, and about being named a member of the Cisco Certified Solution program,” said Joe Barnes, Cohesity’s channel chief. “We see this as a validation of the use of hyper-converged technology for secondary storage.”
Barnes indicated that as Cohesity is a software-defined solution, it becomes more important to give customers their choice of hardware.
“We aligned with Cisco first because of popular demand,” he said. “Cisco has been doing some work with this, and it is validated and in GA today as both a software and a SaaS solution. Some of our joint partners also have this in pilot.”
While Cohesity has not been one of the companies that Cisco has been funding through its venture capital arm, the two companies had familiarity with each other previously. For Cohesity, which does not sell direct, and whose entire route to market previously has ben through its own VAR channel, this will be by no means an exclusive relationship.
“This partnership becomes a key part of route to market,” Barnes said. “As the idea is to give customers choice, we would like Cisco and its channel to be a very large and powerful route to market. But we don’t expect that this will be the only such route to market for our software. We are having conversations with other significant server vendors.
