The HPE deal, which is the only one that has a reselling component, is likely to have the most immediate impact for Cohesity, but both the others have different types of potential as well.
Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing
Santa Clara CA-based hyper-converged secondary storage vendor Cohesity has announced three new partnerships. The one likely to have the most immediate initial impact is with HPE. It will see HPE resell Cohesity’s software with their own servers and network switches through the HPE worldwide Complete program. The Microsoft announcement makes the Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition (CE) available in the Azure Marketplace. The Lenovo announcement is limited to the China market.
The three new deals follow up on a partnering deal with Cisco last October. It saw Cohesity’s technology validated for the Cisco UCS platform, with Cohesity being named a Cisco Certified Solution Partner. At that time, the company indicated that further such relationships were likely to follow.
The HPE deal is likely to be the most significant out of the gate, said Patrick Rogers, Cohesity’s Head of Product Management and Marketing.
“We anticipate that the HPE relationship will have a very immediate impact because of their worldwide footprint and their presence in the market,” Rogers said.
The HPE deal will make a new pre-configured, certified scale-out storage solution that spans both on-prem and public cloud infrastructures available to HPE and its channel partners. It is integrated with HPE’s own Proliant servers and network switches. It will be available immediately through HPE’s Complete program for best-in-class offerings that complement HPE servers and storage, following a pilot program that began last December.
“We love the HPE relationship because they don’t just help us qualify, but actually offer it through HPE Complete – our software on their SKU,” Rogers said. “They took it one step further and gives us global reach, with the HPE sales force and channel partners are incented to drive this. Before, our relationship with them was more of a ‘meet in the channel’ approach.”
The Microsoft relationship, which will see the Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition (CE) become publicly available in the Azure Marketplace, is a conscious complement to the HPE relationship.
“Azure is very strategic for us because Azure is very prominent in the enterprise space,” Rogers said. “They are also very complementary to HPE because HPE will give us an on-prem footprint while Azure complements that in the cloud.”
The Lenovo relationship sees Cohesity receive Lenovo Global IT Certification. Cohesity will also develop optimized offerings for Lenovo customers in Greater China.
“This relationship began when Lenovo acquired our product to use for their own internal use in their China operations,” Rogers said. “They then decided to use it more broadly in the China market.”
The deal has no impact outside of China and Rogers said that no discussions on partnering outside of China have taken place.
“This is still a big deal for us because until now, we haven’t had any presence in China, and there is no one better to partner with in that market than Lenovo,” Rogers said.
Rogers also stressed all these partnerships with big players in the industry are of immense strategic value to Cohesity.
“It signifies a recognition of the large datacentre suppliers that secondary storage is ripe for disruption,” he said. “They see that scale-out architecture for secondary storage will be very impactful, and they want to be part of this. The fastest way for them to do that is to work with Cohesity. HPE and Cisco also came in as strategic investors in our last funding round, and they intended all along to work with us in go-to-market strategies.”
Dell EMC remains the only top tier vendor outside the Cohesity partner orbit.
“We talk to everybody, but there is nothing imminent with them.” Rogers said.
Rogers also stated that despite Cohesity’s addition of these vendors and their own channels to their go-to-market strategy, they remain committed to their own resellers.
“Our primary go-to-market has been and will continue to be through our resellers,” he said.
