For Cohesity, it’s all about expansion and growth in Asia

“We've seen a lot of customers move from our competitors to Cohesity in a desire to improve the speed of recovery and improve the quality of security that they have. We've also seen customers move to our purpose-built backup appliances,” Mark Nutt, Senior Vice President, International Sales at Cohesity.

It’s been nearly four months since Cohesity closed its acquisition of Veritas’ data protection business to become the world’s largest data protection software provider. As with any acquisition, the initial feeling among customers and partners would be how this will impact their strategy, investments and planning for the future.

Interestingly enough, the acquisition was well received by everyone, especially in the Asia Pacific region. The region, which represents a significant chunk of partners and customers for Cohesity, believes the acquisition not only enabled them to have better data protection capabilities but also in a more cost-effective way.

“Cohesity has become the clear market leader. In fact, we repositioned the company as the global leader in AI powered data security. Data security and resiliency are top priorities for our customers. A lot of customers are questioning how they will use and get value from AI,” explained Mark Nutt, Senior Vice President, International Sales at Cohesity in an interview with CRN Asia.

“I think security is driving customers to question whether they have the right quality of data security and data protection, and I think that's driving customers to us. We've seen a lot of customers move from our competitors to Cohesity in a desire to improve the speed of recovery and improve the quality of security that they have. We've also seen customers move to our purpose-built backup appliances,” said Nutt.

When it comes to AI and data protection, Nutt stated that Cohesity is enabling customers to take a modern approach to data security as well as unlock the value of customers secondary data as it relates to AI.

“Customers want speed of recovery, especially with the increasing cyber threats today. Our customers at board level are questioning, how quickly can we respond? And no one recovers quicker than Cohesity. Our speed of recovery in test is proving to be up to 40 times quicker than our modern competitors,” said Nutt.

Nutt also mentioned that Cohesity differentiates itself from competitors in the way it scales both technically and commercially in the market. When Cohesity acquired Veritas, they acquired a company with a large number of connectors, which in turn enabled them to connect to a vast array of platforms and workloads.

“Cohesity is the company that created scale out technology and Veritas is market leader in scale up when it comes to scale, it's a key differentiator for us,” added Nutt.

Apart from that, Nutt also highlighted Cohesity has a market leading solution, which is secure by design and by default. Multi Factor authentication, multi person authorization, anomaly detection, entropy malware scanning, and such are just a few of the features that Cohesity has brought to market.

“We're also heavily invested in working with other technologies in this space so that we are tightly integrated into a best of breed ecosystem. Also, customers are looking for a simple way of protecting their data across these platforms. And in many of these applications and workloads, Cohesity has the market leading user interface which it will be bringing to the Veritas NetBackup customers. So, at some point, NetBackup customers will have the same control plane and management plane as Cohesity through Helios,” explained Nutt.

Interestingly, Nutt also mentioned that this capability is something that many of the Veritas customers have shown an interest in and are excited about. As such, Nutt believes Cohesity will drive simplicity around this topic and around the priority for data security in the market.

“We're managing somewhere in the region of two to 400 exabytes of customers’ secondary data. We believe our modern competitors are limited to about 10 to 15 exabytes. We have a huge size advantage here. Secondary data has historically been kept for backup purposes. Think about it in the future context, being able to connect to it and use it as fuel for new AI workloads and applications. We think that will double the total addressable market for Cohesity and will deliver significant value to our customers and importantly be a differentiator,” added Nutt.

The partner ecosystem

For Nutt, Cohesity’s partner ecosystem in the region is critical to its growth. Nutt pointed out that for partners, they mostly care about three things. They care about customer value, profitability and engagement. And Nutt believes that there isn’t any organization ahead of Cohesity in these three areas.

“When you think about customer value, our value proposition of AI powered data security is resonating with customers and partners. When you think about profitability, we have a program from Cohesity and a program from Veritas that we're running to the end of our fiscal year, but both highly profitable. And then thirdly, when you think about the ease of doing business, we have more than 500 salespeople globally and we are creating demand through our marketing teams with our channel partners,” explained Nutt.

Nutt also stated that Cohesity doesn’t compete with our partners. Instead, its partners make money through taking the technology and delivering positive outcomes for customers in what is a relatively complex area

“I think price will be a problem for our competitors. We're extremely competitive right now. We are delivering unmatched and unparalleled value to customers, but what we deem to be a very fair market rate,” added Nutt.

According to Nutt, it's evident that Cohesity has a desire to maintain and build its position in the region, which is also an important region for them. Cohesity is already experiencing high growth in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. They’ve increased investment in Malaysia, maintained investment in Indonesia and also increased investment in Singapore

Moving forward, the aim for Cohesity will be to maintain what they do best, which is market leading data security offerings that operate with speed at scale.

“We've got to maintain that #1 position. We've got to further distance ourselves, as the market leader, and you'll see us do that. We've got to continue to use AI effectively. We'll be using our advantage around AI to make our products easier to operate at scale with security. And with those exabytes of data, unstructured data, secondary data that we're already helping our customers manage, we have a tremendous future of opportunities,” concluded Nutt.