Storage start-up Cohesity lands in Europe

Californian secondary storage vendor poised to hire local sales teams as it looks to take European channel by storm

US storage start-up Cohesity is looking to deepen ties with UK and European resellers as it sets up operations on this side of the Atlantic.

The vendor was founded in June 2013 by Nutanix founder Mohit Aron and does 100 per cent of its business through the channel. It currently has eight partners in the UK, all signed up by its distributor Ethos.

Cohesity's head of channel, Joe Barnes, told CRN that the initial channel strategy was to draw on Ethos' capabilities to provide local support.

"They've done a fantastic job. We feel like they are part of the family," he added. "Now we are in the process of hiring local sales teams. We are going to look to expand into Europe with the UK as our centre of operations."

The California-based vendor is currently looking at going into central Europe and also plans to have a sales team in the Iberian Peninsula.

"Following our success with Ethos, we plan to expand further into Europe, with the UK serving as center of operations, in the second half of 2016," said Barnes. "In 2017, we intend to expand into APAC."

Cohesity provides a hyper-converged platform for secondary storage, which includes backups, archives, analytics, and cloud connectivity.

"What Cohesity does is provide one limitless container to store all secondary data and we store it in a useable format, eliminating copies," explained Barnes.

"IDC says about 65 per cent of a typical enterprise customer's data is copy data. So now customers are paying lots of money for hardware and software to manage copies of their own data. With Cohesity, customers end up saving significant amounts of money and operational expense by only having to maintain one infrastructure platform with one software interface."

Cohesity's channel strategy will focus on increasing its strategic partners and helping them to accelerate their growth, Barnes said.

"We are focused on trying to manage more strategic partnerships," he added. "We are also looking to put more of our partner benefits into strategic partnerships, where we can help enable those partners to be more successful, and then reward them handsomely."

The vendor is looking to recruit more partners that already have a presence in the enterprise customer base.

Barnes added: "What we are seeing to be most successful in terms of partners is those who have good relationships with larger customers today. Working with local partners that the customers already trust has proved to be very valuable for us."

Barnes joined the company three months ago from EMC where he ran the channel for Western USA.

"I was one of those people who, as soon as I heard the proposition I thought 'wow, this is going to revolutionise the storage industry'," he said.