Cohesity Enhances Partner Program with Service Provider Track

Cohesity, the 100 percent partner-led hyperconverged secondary storage vendor, on Tuesday announced steep investments in its partner program, in addition to a new service-provider track.

Partners can expect to see enhancements in enterprise incentives, partner training, a hands-on lab, partner development funds, marketing and the service-provider offering.

“We have a very focused partner approach,” Todd Palmer, vice president of worldwide channels, told us. “We want the fewest number of partners and we want to make sure that we can invest big in those partners to help them accelerate the growth of their Cohesity business.”

Cohesity’s Todd Palmer

The service provider partner track is for cloud and managed services providers who deliver cloud and managed services on-premises, in their data centers, and across public cloud environments. Service providers who offer value-added offerings such as industry or vertical-specific services, consulting or professional services, managed services and integration, are also a fit for the new service-provider track.

This new track sits under the company’s umbrella Cohesity Partner Program, alongside the vendor’s technology partners, system integrators, channel partners and distributors. Cohesity’s partner program has been around for about two years.

“Existing customers or customers considering Cohesity are asking us not only for integration with public-cloud providers, but often they want a regional or global service provider that’s not a hyperscaler and/or that wants a managed services provider that can manage their multicloud,” David Kosman, head of global cloud service providers, told us.

It took the company nine months to build what it says is a robust curriculum for partners. The new, free resource includes a full curriculum for partner sales professionals, another curriculum for engineering and one for post-sales individuals, each with three levels of accreditation. There’s instructor-led training available in major metropolitan areas as well as online training.

For service providers, Cohesity developed the Success@Scale enablement for jointly building a plan for success through co-design workshops, cloud-ready testing, training programs and premier technical support.

Cohesity has also invested in a hands-on lab, hosted by an independent third-party. The lab was built for both Cohesity system engineers (SEs) and partner SEs.

“Once a partner SE passes a certain level in their curriculum, they get access to this free online lab that’s built in the cloud,” said Palmer.

Partners get their own unique Cohesity lab environment that can take them through a learning path or they can use lab as a demo or pilot or proof of concept (PoC) for their customers.

A new focus for Cohesity is the launch of a formal MDF and PDF program. The formalized program includes business-building sessions between partners and Cohesity. MDF and PDF dollars can be earmarked for end-user demand generation, and sponsoring and enablement sessions within their companies, for example.

Cohesity is increasing investments in partner-enablement programs across geographies that include joint marketing planning, field activities and demand-generation campaigns for pipeline development. Not-for-resale (NFR) demo equipment is available for partners that are interested in acquiring Cohesity technology for their labs and demo centers. Cohesity appliances and licenses are available for prospect and customer trials.

Access to the Cohesity partner-program enhancements are accessible through a redesigned the partner portal. The vendor refreshed a lot of the materials on the portal, which includes a wide range of sales tools, FAQs, playbooks, a prospecting center, product launch kits, and marketing campaigns.

To help partners grow their business, Cohesity is offering …

… lucrative enhancements for partner who work with large enterprise customers.

“We recognize the fact that these large customers rely on our customers for advice on infrastructure and deployment of infrastructure and projects,” Palmer.

The large enterprise-customer market is a target for Cohesity, which is why the vendor will reward partners who find opportunities with a significant back-end incentive.

“Partner reps and SEs can make an additional $40,000 on each one of their opportunities if they’re selling in that large enterprise market — that’s in addition to the front-end margins,” he said.

Cohesity is calling the financial incentive the Cohesity 2000, for the 2000 large enterprises in the U.S. and Canada that it has identified as candidates for Cohesity solutions.

And, to help partners, Cohesity has expanded its field sales coverage to support partners in North America, Europe and Asia, and has also expanded partnerships with key technology vendors such as Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Microsoft, and VMware.