Cohesity has its eyes on Asia

For Kit Beall, Chief Revenue Officer at Cohesity as well as Mike Walkey, Senior Vice President, Cohesity Global Channels & Alliances, APAC has become a strategically important market for Cohesity as the AI-powered data security vendor looks to not only maintain but accelerate its leadership position in the region.

It’s been almost a year now since Cohesity completed the acquisition of Veritas to become the largest data protection provider in the world. Over the past ten months, the vendor has been working on integrating solutions as well as enhancing its capabilities in data protection.

Globally, 70% of the Global 500 companies are Cohesity customers. With a 20% market share in data protection, Cohesity was also positioned as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Backup and Data Protection Platforms for the sixth year. More recently, Cohesity was also named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cyber Recovery 2025 Vendor Assessment for the second time.

While the recognition by Gartner and IDC is testament to Cohesity’s success following the acquisition and integration of Veritas, bringing together two different channel programs has been a rather interesting journey for both the vendor and its partners. Naturally, Cohesity would want to provide partners with the best opportunities possible, while partners will also want to have a clear understanding of how they can serve their customers with products from both Cohesity and Veritas.

As such, Cohesity introduced the Cohesity Aspire Partner Program in August this year. The new, unified framework is built for the modern partner landscape as it simplifies how partners across diverse business models and routes to market can engage with Cohesity to drive profitability, unlock new revenue streams, and access certifications and training.

CRN Asia caught up with Kit Beall, Chief Revenue Officer at Cohesity as well as Mike Walkey, Senior Vice President, Cohesity Global Channels & Alliances to understand more about how partners are reacting to the new program as well as the opportunities for Cohesity in the Asia Pacific region.

Looking at Cohesity in Asia Pacific, Beall mentioned that before the merger, the APAC region was a relatively small portion of Cohesity’s business. However, it's now increased significantly post-merger, especially since Veritas has had many years of experience in the region.

“We are the number one provider in the region of data protection software. We have many great customers across all the different sectors. So, we have quite a nice footprint. For us, this has become really a strategically important market for us. And our goal is to not only maintain but to accelerate our leadership position in the region. So, we've added quite a lot of investment in terms of headcounts and resources. We not only help our customers but equally help our partners be successful as we continue to evolve Cohesity. The demand from customers and partners is stronger than we've ever seen,” Beall said.

According to Beall, the increase in demand is simply because of the increasing cyberattacks that have been happening in the region. Customer want to be protected from these attacks, which his why the demand has just “gone through the roof.”

“Data protection and data security is the single most important topic in all of security right now. It is the last line of defense. And so, this is what our customers and our partners have realized and recognized. And that's why APAC is not just a critical market but also a critical time in the market,” he added.

The Aspire Partner Program in APAC

Given that Cohesity runs through the channel, the partner ecosystem is paramount to its success in the region. With the new partner program launched, Walkey believes there has been a lot of excitement about what Cohesity has done with it. Walkey, who previously held the same role at Veritas, believes the combined partner ecosystem is one of the most powerful things Cohesity has in APAC.

“There is a great foundation of long-term, loyal, established Veritas heritage partners that are now great new Cohesity partners. And so, the combined entity now really has a majority of the routes to market covered, with horsepower in each of them, sophistication, skill set, ability to deliver that outcome-oriented solution in a much broader way than either company did independently before. To me, that's one of the exciting expansion opportunities that we have going forward. And we're seeing that come together already,” he said.

On the Aspire Partner Program, Walkey pointed out that Cohesity has taken the best of both prior programs and consolidated.

“It really is a great combination of the best of both coming together to expand that opportunity margin, which is what our partners are primarily paying their folks on or are the most interested in to increase their margin potential. And what they need to do to be successful is not only support the customer base that they have, but they also need to grow,” Walkey said.

Walkey explained that is what the new combined company offers to partners because they have a great foundation in the data protection world.

“They can build from that, add new capabilities in the security side, extend into the advanced security space with higher value sales and extend that toward the AI analytics space and insight space where everyone is exploring and we actually can deliver an outcome. So, all of that's coming together to show them an opportunity and also show them how to make margins and make profits while they're doing it,” Walkey said.

For Walkey, as the Aspire program brings all partners in at their existing level, it also gave them the opportunity to come in based on their zones and revenue thresholds for the market to participate and go drive the business going forward.

“If you're a platinum partner, you came in as a premier partner. If you're a JFP partner with Cohesity, you come in as a premier partner. So, as I look at it, we need to cover the market opportunities, but we want our top partners to be the most knowledgeable of us. Our top partners have the greatest breadth of services, the greatest breadth of business models that they can offer to cover that market. Some operate both as a resale model and as an MSP as an example. So, there are many different business models and sometimes they operate multiple. We support all of that, but we need to cover the market opportunity,” Walkey explained.

Walkey also highlighted that Cohesity would prefer that their largest, most dedicated and knowledgeable partners capture the majority of the revenue in that market. This is also where Cohesity puts most of its resources and investment in terms of making sure that they're successful.

“There can be new partners, particularly in some of the newer solution areas, maybe a security specialist who has deep skills in the security space, that's attractive to us. Many of our current partners may not have that same skill set. Or there could be an AI-oriented, analytics-oriented partner who brings in a unique set of skill sets there that are targeted and have deep knowledge there. That would be another logical place that we would consider adding additional partners,” Walkey added.

Cohesity in APAC

The APAC region continues to be a key focus area for Cohesity. According to Walkey, the APAC market has been a historically strong market for Cohesity with disproportionately high revenue when Veritas was around, prior to the acquisition

“There's tremendous opportunity in the ASEAN markets. We have a lot of the emerging markets like Vietnam and the Philippines. A number of our partners are expanding their presence there, building new offers, building new solutions and they're taking to market, either as a resale partnership or as a service,” he said.

Walkey also pointed out that many of Cohesity’s partners are exploring if they can deliver some of those capabilities, whether from a resiliency as an outcome type of service or as a service into those markets and leverage some of the footprint that they've got.

“Japan's a big focus. We've got resource investment, relationship investment, solutions investment and channel investment across the board to ramp that market and capture the opportunity that we know is there. Our partners and customers see that,” Walkey said.

For Beall, as Cohesity is seeing demand across the region, partners are vital as it helps them to go in faster.

“It's about data security, data protection, and ultimately how to unlock the value of the data. And I can tell you that from a market perspective, we just don't see a limit because the challenge is continuing to grow every day. Why? Attackers are getting smarter, but equally, the data continues to grow every day. So, I think if you kind of look at both of those together, this is why it's such a high priority. There are so many country regulations as well. It's also equally important that we support our customers and our partners as they manage those regulations and particularly focus on data sovereignty. So, providing the options and the right solutions for each market,” Beall said.

It’s all about resiliency for customers

Beall also explained that Cohesity customer requirements can be broken into three categories. First, it's all about performance and scale, whereby customers need the ability to recover quickly.

“Cohesity has been engineered to scale all the way up to the largest organizations in the world but equally scales down to smaller organizations. Because again, even if you're a small bank or a small telco, you still need to take care of your end customers. Any downtime is unacceptable. So, scale and performance are on everyone's mind,” Beall said.

Secondly, Beall said it's about meeting regulatory compliance.

“In a lot of cases, whether it’s a telco, a bank, or the public sector, there are a lot of requirements. Of course, Europe has done a lot of work in this space with DORA. GDPR has an impact on how you manage and protect your data. So regulatory compliance is a big driver,” he added.

The third requirement, which is also the most important, is resiliency.

“Our customers are focused on the most important outcome, which is being resilient. They've realized that you can't build a high enough wall or a deep enough moat around your enterprise to keep the attackers out. We often joke that if you build a 25-meter-high wall, the attackers build a 26-meter ladder. It doesn't matter. The resiliency of the organization is the most important thing. We always talk about the data center. What's in that name? The data. That's the thing we have to protect and defend. So, the notion of resiliency. It doesn't matter what sector you're in, how big you are, how small you are. Resiliency of your organization is the single most important thing. So those are the drivers that customers are looking for,” Beall explained.

Beall also mentioned that customers would request the best practice as they’re a global company and experience this across the world. For Beall, this is one of the powerful things about being the global leader, as Cohesity has the opportunity to see how this is done in every market around the world, and the best way to do it.

“That's why customers are looking at us, not just for the technology solution, but also the best practices, the operating models, to bring it full circle. They're looking to us to bring the right partners in and to help them achieve those goals,” he said.

For Walkey, these are the areas partners need to be experts in.

“It's just not about selling the product. It is maybe at the end of the day, but in the interim, it's about exposing the threat and the opportunity and a path to get yourself ahead of it and be prepared and resilient against it. So those are the kinds of things that we put a lot of focus and effort into that are building our partner's business and skills and capability so that they can be the front of that conversation and expose that to more customers than we can with our own internal sales team,” Walkey said.

Walkey also believes that partners have a tremendous opportunity to help customers not only prepare but to help them practice. This includes practicing resiliency, practicing recovery, and practicing not just the technical steps, but also the organizational steps required to recover.

“This is something that our partners have helped us do and are going to continue to be in the leading position to do that,” he said.

Cohesity in 2026

When asked what partners and customers can expect from Cohesity in 2026, Beall summarized it in one word – speed.

For Beall, the speed of innovation, speed of support, speed of responsiveness when customers do have an issue, and also speed of the roadmap and innovations that Cohesity is going to be bringing.

“We've been vocal in the market. It's urgent. This is an urgent topic for industry, for the economy and for the security of even at the national level. And so, for us, we go to work every day with a sense of speed and urgency. And I think you're going to see just a tremendous amount of innovation and investment from us globally,” Beall said.

Beall added that Cohesity is absolutely committed to a build and partner strategy, and buy is always an option.

“We believe this is an ecosystem play. So, we will buy assets and build assets where we think there's competitive differentiation. But I would say equally what we found, and what's made us successful is the ability to partner with other technology providers. Because when you go into an environment, you always have to work with what's there, whether it's a firewall or an identity security company. So, we are partnering deeply with a handful of companies. We have a data security alliance, which has really helped us go much faster there. But in the future, if it makes strategic sense, certainly acquiring additional assets is on the potential list of things we might do,” he concluded.