Customers, Partners to Benefit from Cohesity's Big Funding Round

Cohesity, the hyperconverged secondary storage vendor, has raised $250 million in Series D funding led by Softbank Vision Fund and strategic investors such as Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Sequoia Capital.

In just a year and a half, the relatively young company that was included in the 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software earlier this year has raised $410 million. Other Customers’ Choice 2018 vendors are: Veeam, SEP,  Commvault, Unitrends, Actifio and Acronis.

[As a side note, Garter delayed its most recent Backup and Recovery Magic Quadrant report as top key analysts departed the research firm to work for vendors, The Register, reported last month. Those analysts are Pushan Rinnen, former lead analyst and author of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup & Recovery Solutions, who Rubrik hired in April. About the same time, Veeam hired Dave Russell, former vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, and author of the 2017 Magic Quandrant for Data Center Backup & Recovery Solutions. On May 1, Frank DiPerna, Gartner ombudsman specialist, posted a blog — “What Happens When Analysts Leave Gartner?”]

Cohesity’s Mohit Aron

Cohesity founder Mohit Aron wrote that the latest infusion of funding will target eliminating fragmentation, or legacy and siloed backup and recovery products that protect critical data, a key customer pain point.

“[Customers] spend about $60 billion each year juggling these separate point solutions! And that’s just the capital expense, not taking into account the significant operational expense from slow processes and extra personnel. They want their next move to be long-term,” he wrote.

“My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data — backup, test and development, analytics and more,” Aron added.

Cohesity’s partner ecosystem includes systems, software and cloud alliance partners, as well as resellers and system integrators. The company is 100 percent channel-focused and offers partner implementation and optimization service opportunities.

In May 2017, Cohesity brought in Todd Palmer as vice president of worldwide channels. He’s responsible for growing the company’s footprint in the Americas, EMEA and APAC, and bringing Cohesity’s secondary storage platform to more midsize and large enterprise customers.