Druva to Revamp Partner Program, Taps Cohesity Vet as Channel Leader

SaaS backup and recovery provider Druva has reorganized its worldwide channel organization, tapping industry veteran Mike Houghton as senior VP of global partners and alliances. Druva partners should expect to oversee an expansion to of the company’s Compass Partner Program, which it will launch next month.

Druva’s Mike Houghton

Houghton, who was channel leader at Druva rival Cohesity for two years, replaces Robert Brower. Brower, a longtime Commvault exec, had previously joined Druva as VP of operations and chief of staff to Druva founder and CEO Jaspreet Singh. A year later, Druva tapped Brower to lead its partner organization. While he launched Druva’s MSP program at the time, Brower was better known for his operations skills.

“He took on this role to fulfill a need that the organization had with the idea that there would be some type of time frame where he would go on to another role,” Houghton told Channel Futures. Houghton said Druva is committed to its go-to-market alliance with Dell and its partnership with AWS, which hosts Druva’s SaaS-based data protection platform.

We sat down with Houghton for an in-depth conversation.

Channel Futures: Why did you decide to join Druva?

Mike Houghton: I was very interested in the product. It is an incredibly untold solution, being 100%, SaaS and with a go to market via the cloud, which I think is a big advantage. It’s a big differentiator, and an opportunity for us to tell that story.

CF: What is that untold story that Druva partners need to know?

MH: All of our competitors primarily have an on-premises solution trying to get to the cloud — trying to get to a pure, SaaS play. And we have been exclusively SaaS since the day we were born. In my mind, we have a five-to-10-year advantage over most of our competitors as a pure SaaS play, that they are trying to catch up to. We can take the knowledge and that capability we’ve built over more than a decade to market and differentiate how we go to market with our customers, because most people are looking for an easier solution. I’ll use the [phrase] “plug-and-play” solution. It’s easy to deploy, it’s easy to consume, it’s easy to use, and as we hear from most of our customers and partners, it just works.

Druva partners will want to read the rest of our Q&A with Houghton in the slideshow above.