5 Channel Ops: Cohesity Takes Aim At Secondary Storage, AT&T Security Win

Are you a fixer or a tosser? The idea of identifying and repairing at-risk partnerships rather than walking away was a running theme at an event sponsored by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, held at one of Schneider Electric’s flagship R&D facilities in Andover, Massachusetts. The panel included partnership pros, all holding ASAP certifications, from biotech firm Baxalta as well as IBM, Liberty Mutual Insurance and Schneider. Three takeaways: Partnerships can’t be a volume game. The focus needs to be on quality, and quality relationships are worth preserving. NationWide uses scorecards and analytics to actively monitor partners so that the alliance team can intervene early, before relationships go south. Michelle Gardner, a partner exec in IBM’s Ready for Commerce program, said providers can head off problems by managing expectations upfront and providing resources on demand — not every partner is getting daily phone calls, but they do have access to the tools they need to succeed.

In addition, for suppliers, partnerships bring in enough revenue that alliance pros should have a line to top executives. If the head of a vendor’s channel program only sees the CEO via chance elevator meetings, that should raise a red flag. And finally, co-opetition is a must today. Liberty Mutual alliance VP Kara Shipulski says her company has deals with competitors like Geico and USAA, because that’s how they can best serve customers. The key, said Shipulski, is to ensure they’re companies you’re “proud to have brand alignment with.” Scott San Antonio, North American director, alliances, at Schneider Electric agreed, saying his company works closely with Cisco, even though there are some areas of overlap, so that partners can deliver complete data-center solutions.

In a cruel twist, a corner of the room where the event was held was conspicuously curtained off, and San Antonio announced that it contained a new invention under development by Schneider, no peeking allowed. Not sure why everyone was looking at the only journalist in the room …

Cohesity Tackles Dark Data

This week marks general availability of the Cohesity Data Platform, aimed at consolidating all of a customer’s secondary storage, from tape to cloud-archival services, onto scalable appliances with single-pane-of-glass management and easy visibility for analytics. I spoke with Mohit Aron, Cohesity’s founder and CEO, about the company’s direction and partner plan. Aron also founded Nutanix and led the design and development of Google File System (GFS), the software that manages data on Google’s large-scale clusters, so he knows from storage and hyperconvergence. He launched Cohesity in June 2013 and has raised about $70 million in funding. The company has 70 employees, more than half engineers, many of them Google veterans.

Aron sees four problems with secondary storage now: fragmentation, as partners or customer IT teams need to manage multiple vendors, licenses, UIs and management systems; data protection that’s just an insurance policy, with no value unless data is copied to a test/dev server; little visibility into what exactly is being retained; and a lack of easy scalability, so IT teams either overprovision capacity or end up with silos.

“People spend $44 billion more than they should in managing extra copies,” says Aron, citing IDC data. “And they have no clue how much of this data can bite them from a security and compliance point of view.”

He compares storage to an iceberg: Primary is the tip above water. It’s the dark data that’s going to cause pain. Aron says Cohesity appliances consolidate secondary data onto a single, scalable platform. “And when I say ‘scalable,’ I mean Google-like scalable,” says Aron. “We can incrementally grow without any limits.”

The core Cohesity product is a 2U scale-out appliance with four server nodes; embedded backup, archival and remote replication software; cloud connectors; single-pane management; and workflows for integrated analytics (see exact specs here). Aron says most customers move incrementally; when it’s time for hardware refresh or service renewal, data is migrated on to the appliance by running a restore process.

“We made it very easy to install — it’s literally done in 15 minutes,” he said. The systems are architected to predict disk failure. “Our appliances call home, which means our support team can look at problems before customers even know there’s a problem.”

As to protecting data residing on Cohesity gear, Aron says the appliances support cloud archival into Google Nearline cold storage (support for Amazon Glacier is on tap). Customers can also connect tape devices or do disaster recovery to a remote Cohesity appliance. Policies allow automated movement of cold data into a cloud archival service. “We allow customers to embrace the concept of hybrid cloud without having multiple vendors,” said Aron. “We make it really simple.”

A Cohesity setup starts at $110,000. While Aron says they’re not focused on any vertical, the system is best suited for midmarket and enterprise customers. A key selling point for the business is analytics. They’re paying to store terabytes of historical data, may as well get some insight from it. “Gone are the days when people had to copy data out to another cluster” to enable the business to run queries, says Aron.

“We are selling 100 percent through the channel,” says Aron, adding they’ve signed 20 on VARs so far, including Dasher. “In the beginning, we hand-hold quite a bit,” says Aron. Cohesity provides sales engineers and, support team are standing by to help. “But the hope is that eventually we will train channel partner to offload a lot of that service work from us.”

Cohesity is doing a demonstration of the Data Platform via webinar on Tuesday, Oct. 20. Registration is going on now.

AT&T Wins Security Award, Takes Spoofing Legit

AT&T’s Project Astra, which provides a framework for virtual security services, won an award this week for “best project” in the information security industry from T.E.N., a national technology and security networking firm. AT&T beat out ADP, Blackstone, BNY Mellon, Citi, Comcast, New York Life and Quest Diagnostics.

Astra uses APIs to deploy virtualized firewall, intrusion detection, scanning, threat intelligence, reporting, identity and access management, and inventory management services. Virtualized functions can be inserted quickly where needed, including in the cloud, in an automated fashion, and updated in real time. If you’re unclear on your responsibility to secure customer applications in the cloud, check out this post from F5 cloud expert Lori MacVittie. The operative concept: “If [an app] was vulnerable to Heartbleed or Shellshock or Apache Killer on-premises, it’s still vulnerable in the cloud. And vice versa. The attack surface of an application does not change with its deployment location. What changes when you move from on-premises to the cloud is what you are responsible for securing.” The Astra framework should help partners move protection with workloads.

Also in a blog post this week, AT&T CMO David Christopher announced a consumer-focused program that bears watching for business customers. The new AT&T NumberSync service will allow a user to connect a range of compatible devices to a primary mobile number, for free, and drawing from the same pool of data. For companies that equip field workers with tablets, wearables and/or PCs and phones, this could dramatically simplify communications. The service will work when the smartphone isn’t present, doesn’t depend on Bluetooth and will feed into one corporate voice mailbox. Whether the employee is communicating from a smartwatch or tablet, an end customer will see one recognizable phone number.

It’s not here yet — Christopher writes “we expect to launch NumberSync on our first device fairly soon with additional devices launching in the holiday timeframe. We’re taking a standards-based, network approach that will make connecting a wide variety of devices easier to give you a better user experience.”

While the post is light on technical details, it seems clear that the service will need the cooperation of device makers, and it reportedly will not support sharing a number between two smartphones. AT&T promises more information soon. (Request: Please include in-car sync systems.)

Adtran Helps Monetize Wi-Fi

Adtran this week announced availability of its ProCloud Analytics offering, which it demonstrated at its partner conference in August. The product is meant to help service providers, channel partners and enterprises monetize Wi-Fi services delivered by the ProCloud managed offering by translating customer demographic data into actionable business intelligence.

For retail and hospitality sites, end customers see fast, free Wi-Fi as a right, not a privilege. And, as we discuss in a recent report, technological improvements in Wi-Fi mean most customers’ WLAN infrastructures are due for major redesigns — 802.11ac is standard on every new device, and it’s the future. That’s an opportunity in itself, and if you can also deliver a quantifiable return on that investment, all the better.

Cloud-managed wireless networks present opportunities to do just that by layering in services to directly engage with end customers and quickly analyze the data APs capture. Adtran’s new Analytics offering can use social media log-ins to find detailed demographic and preference information about customers. You can also set the system to track the number of visitors, type of device used, and time of visit as well as push automated email marketing messages and targeted coupons. Creepy, but effective.

InfoBlox Updates Partner Program

InfoBlox announced this week that Ricardo Moreno will take over as vice president of worldwide channels after 18 years in Cisco’s partner organization. If your first reaction was “InfoWho?” then you’ve likely never managed or tried to secure a DNS infrastructure. While the company’s stock price took a wild ride this week, Infoblox appliances manage the network protocol services, including IP, DNS and DHCP, in most large enterprises and many service providers. It also maintains the Infoblox DNS Threat Index, which tracks worldwide malicious DNS activity, including phishing attacks.

Recently, InfoBlox also inked a deal to deploy a virtual address management appliance in the AWS EC2 cloud. Moreno told me that more than 90 percent of InfoBlox’s business goes through its channel and that he’s working on a new partner program.

“I call it ‘Infoblox Fully Loaded,’ and it is a reflection of a partner-centric mindset, designed to give partners more space to add value to our business and to reward partners for that value,” he says.

InfoBlox is also making moves to expand into security and cloud. “This creates opportunities for new revenue streams and strategic engagements for partners,” said Moreno. “I have been talking to a number of partners, listening to their expectations, to learn what can be improved. And as we have been sharing our plan, the feedback has been very positive.”

PC Powers Activate!

In the face of sagging PC sales, Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo and Microsoft have banded together on a joint ad push across multiple media “showcasing PC category innovation.” While mainly aimed at consumers ahead of the 2015 holiday shopping season, the rather slick materials in the “PC Does What?” campaign might be helpful for partners with customers on the fence about employee system upgrades — or considering jumping to Apple Macs.

The site highlights processor advances by Intel, strong adoption of Windows 10 and innovative hardware from Dell, HP and Lenovo.

The six-week, integrated-ad push is scheduled to kick off next week in the United States and China, the No. 1 and No. 2 PC markets in the world, with the goal of making consumers feel bad about their old, slow, buggy PC hardware. Areas of emphasis will be better Wi-Fi speed and battery power, higher-resolution screens, biometric capabilities and integrated touch screens on convertible devices.

“The possibilities of today’s PCs are endless, but millions of people are still using outdated systems,” said Karen Quintos, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Dell, in a statement. “For consumers and business users alike, entirely new benefits and features come standard in the latest devices.”

Plus: An interesting piece in WMPoweruser suggests that Microsoft might reserve the right to push updates and patches direct to Windows smartphones, with or without having the carriers on board. That’s a smart strategy more aligned with Apple iOS than Google Android. If (when) Windows phones are hit with an exploit like Stagefright, it’s a win for business and consumer users to get the fix quickly and without foot dragging by carriers.

Follow editor in chief @LornaGarey on Twitter.