Cohesity Hires Ex-NetApp, Brocade, CA Exec as Channel Leader

Cohesity has tapped channel veteran Bill Lipsin to accelerate the growth of its partner community. His new role at Cohesity is vice president of global channel sales.

Most recently, Lipsin was senior partner at The Spur Group, a consultancy that helps companies boost revenue growth by optimizing channels, end user sales, business operations and supporting communications. At Cohesity, Lipsin will be responsible for the company’s go-to-market strategy, channel programs, enablement and distribution channels.

Cohesity’s Bill Lipsin

“Cohesity is rewriting the book on data management, making it easier than ever for organizations to back up and extract value from their data on-prem and in the cloud, while lowering their operational costs through dramatic performance advantages and much simpler administration,” said Lipsin. “I’m thrilled to be coming on board to help accelerate the incredible momentum Cohesity has achieved through their channel ecosystem and their laser focus on customer value.”

Founded in 2013, Cohesity is focused on disrupting data management. This month, Garter named Cohesity a visionary – one of three named in this category – in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions. This category focuses on vendors that deliver backup and recovery solutions to protect enterprise data center workloads. Cohesity’s vision is to solve the critical challenge of mass data fragmentation, helping to empower customers to do more with backup data.

Lipsin is a seasoned channel executive having held top positions at NetApp – vice president, worldwide channels; Brocade – vice president, global channels and systems integrators; Arbor Networks – vice president, global channels and alliances; and CA Technologies – senior vice president, worldwide channel sales.

“Bill has world-class experience in growing and managing a rapidly expanding and efficient global channel partner ecosystem,” said Rob Salmon, chief operating officer, Cohesity. “He has industry-proven success and is joining Cohesity at the perfect juncture as we continue to disrupt the data management market and look to build even tighter integrations with partners around the world. We are excited to have Bill on the Cohesity leadership team and are looking forward to his positive impact on our business.”

Cohesity is a channel-driven company and continues to expand its partner program. According to the vendor, of all the active channel partners that booked business with the company in its 2019 fiscal year, 70% more than doubled their business, while more than one-half grew their business by more than 200%.

In keeping with market trends, Cohesity transitioned to a software business model and recently reported an increase in software revenue greater than 100% year over year. For the last two quarters, more than one-half of the vendor’s new contracts were subscription-based.

In May, Cohesity acquired Imanis Data, expanding the company’s ability to support, back up and recover Hadoop and NoSQL workloads and supporting databases – including MongoDB – the way it does for traditional databases such as Oracle and SQL, along with virtual cloud and physical workloads.