Cohesity says that the achievement of the AWS Storage Competency validation will assist them significantly on the technology front, as well as in sales and in marketing.
Today, hyperconverged secondary storage vendor Cohesity is announcing that it has earned the AWS Storage Competency validation for AWS Technology Partners. The company sees this as central to increasing their AWS business, and that it will further highlight the cloud connection to partners who have not fully adopted Cohesity’s cloud strategy.
“This AWS Storage Competency validation meets a criteria that said we had to do some more integration, satisfy a technical review around integrations and have a certain level of customer references,” said Sameer Nori, Cohesity’s Director of Product Marketing. “It’s a pretty big milestone.”
The Competency requirement Cohesity satisfied required proof of four verified customer references of completed storage projects using AWS. Two of those four have to be publicly referenceable.
“We also had to do another technical architectural review to ensure we meet all the requirements,” Nori added. “They are very rigorous.”
A major reason this kind of certification is desirable in the IT industry is the validation they provide both for prospects and existing customers in the market, and this one is no exception.
“Customers care that an ISV has met the highest bar,” Nori said.” It provides customers with more security. Being a competency partner also starts to unlock a lot more collaboration and joint go-to-market efforts, and the funding that they make available. Now we get exposure to more programs.”
While this Competency must be requalified each year, Cohesity also expects it to drive benefits in the future.
“AWS is an innovation machine, that keeps coming up with new services,” Nori stated. “We expect a lot more earlier access to things that are relevant for us that we can partner with them on, as well as to accelerate integration with other storage services.”
Cohesity is looking to have similar levels of integration with all the big hyperscalers, in order to let customers make their choice of what public cloud provider they will use for a certain application.
“From our viewpoint, we recognize we need to integrate with all of them, and also pursue individual opportunities with all of them from a go-to-market perspective,” Nori said.
Cohesity goes entirely to market through channel partners, and the expanded AWS relationship has a couple of important channel implications.
“This makes it interesting for our channel partners because they are aggressively looking to develop cloud services business and AWS is a key partner for many of these,” Nori noted. “This enables very good triangulation. In addition, for those who are not that aware of the fact that we have a very robust cloud business, this will make them wake up. This will encourage them to figure out their cloud strategy with us.”
Nori concluded that for Cohesity, the Storage Competency designation is a very big deal.
“We are excited about reaching this technology level, as is AWS,” he said. “We will be able to improve, on the technical side, and around sales and marketing, – and we expect more collaboration and strengthening of the business in the months to come as a result.”
