How Cohesity will spend its mega $250m funding round
COO Rob Salmon opens up on global expansion plans and potential IPO
Cohesity garnered a lot of attention earlier this week after it revealed that it had raised $250m in Series D funding, counting Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and SoftBank Vision Fund among its investors.
Opening up on the rationale behind the round, Cohesity COO Rob Salmon has now told CRN that the investment will be used to fund a large-scale global expansion, confirming that a UK push is part of these plans.
"[The UK] is a very important market to us. We have some great partnerships and we will continue to build on that, so I expect us to do quite a bit more hiring in the UK specifically," said Salmon.
Cohesity works with distributor Ethos in the UK and counts Softcat, CDW and Computacenter among its UK partners.
Salmon said that the company is looking to recruit more partners, but plans to take a "quality-over-quantity" approach.
"We have some great partners already and we're always looking to expand on that," he said.
"We're looking for partners that really want to understand our capabilities and be trained in our capabilities so that they can add the benefit to enterprises."
Cohesity was founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron (who also founded Nutanix) and focuses on secondary storage, claiming to put 100 per cent of its business through the channel.
Salmon was coy on the prospect of Cohesity going public, stating that it is not a focus for the storage vendor at the moment but hinting that it may be part of the long-term plan.
"We don't have a timeframe for [going public], but with all the interest in the company the logical outcome one day will be to be quite a large company," he said.
"Right now we're focused on putting investment to work to make sure we scale the organisation.
"We expect to be a very large company; we expect this to be one of the de facto architectures big enterprises are using, and so that will come with even more exciting milestones along the way."
Strategic investment
Salmon came out of retirement to join Cohesity last August, after previously spending 22 years at NetApp.
He said that the intense investor interest around the vendor that resulted in the largest funding for a storage start-up since 2015 is due to a decade-long lack of innovation in the storage market.
"There has been a lot of innovation in the heart of the datacentre and how we think of the public cloud and flash," he said.
"Yet the lion's share of the data for most enterprises today is held and managed on legacy systems and architectures that have been around for 10, 15, 20 years. This is an area that is absolutely ripe for disruption.
"The reason SoftBank got involved in our company is because they look at big markets and those that can disrupt those markets. They canvassed the landscape of the competitors that were out there and who could do it and chose us."
Cisco and HPE, who renewed their support for Cohesity in the most recent round of funding, continue to be strategic investors for the company.
"Because we're a software-defined solution and we have qualified Cisco and HPE solutions that we run on top of, it broadens the reach for Cohesity but it also gives them [Cisco and HPE] the ability to offer a next-generation solution to their customers," Salmon added.
"This opens up many more doors for both of these large enterprises and allows them to bring new thinking into the heart of datacentres where they are having these conversations."
Salmon predicts that there will be more entrants into Cohesity's market space in the next few years, including legacy vendors coming out with their own secondary solution. Salmon believes that Cohesity's next-generation architecture will be what competitors measure themselves against. "We welcome all [competitors]," he stated.