Hyperconverged secondary storage startup Cohesity is growing rapidly. And channel partners deserve plenty of credit for that growth, according to Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron.
Among the business metrics the company shared today:
- Revenues grew 300 percent in the company's fiscal year 2018, which closed July 31.
- The annual revenue run rate is now $200 million, up from $100 million only two quarters ago.
- On the channel front, 81 percent of Cohesity’s partners grew their business with the company more than 100 percent in fiscal year 2018, while 75 percent of partners grew their business by more than 200 percent.
- Cohesity, the company also noted, remains 100 percent channel focused.
On the strategic alliance front, the company has been expanding its relationships with Cisco Systems and HP Enterprise. And on the cloud services front, deeper integrations with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are in place.
Customers typically leverage Cohesity to consolidate a patchwork of secondary silos including backup, files and objects, test/dev, archiving, analytics, and cloud with a "platform that scales in a way no other vendor can match," Aron asserts.
Key customer include Air Bud Entertainment, AutoNation, BC Oil and Gas Commission, Lending Club, the U.S. Air Force, WestLotto, and more.
Storage Market Competition, Innovation
Ironically, the momentum statements come only two days after StorageCraft President Douglas Brockett poked Cohesity, alleging the rival's data platform is "priced for large enterprises," and often leaves customers with "complexity and high cost of ownership."
Seeking to prove the assertion, StorageCraft launched OneXafe to converge primary and secondary storage in the midmarket, simplify IT management, and drive down costs for customers, the company says. Naturally, disrupting Cohesity also is a OneXafe launch goal. OneXafe is based on StoraeCraft's buyout of Exablox.
Still, Cohesity isn't resting on its laurels. The company this week unveiled Helios, a SaaS-based management dashboard for secondary data and applications. According to the company:
- SLA Automation: Administrators can define service-level agreements (SLAs) by job and workload. In response, Cohesity SmartAssist will automatically evaluate required versus available resources (e.g., compute, storage) across all clusters to meet SLAs or suggest changes as needed, the company says.
- Operational Management Automation: Machine learning studies a customer's infrastructure and determines what adjustments or modifications may be necessary in the future, the company asserts.
- Multi-Customer Learning System: The SaaS solution analyzes operational metadata from Cohesity customers globally -- providing benchmarks and best practices from the overall ecosystem of customers.
CEO Mohit Aron: Strong Track Record
Cohesity CEO Mohit Aron has a strong track record in the enterprise infrastructure market. He previously co-founded Nutanix, the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructur (HCI) specialist.
Aron went on to launch Cohesity in 2013. Investors have embraced his vision and business strategy. The company in June 2018 revealed $250 million in Series D funding. Key investors in the round include SoftBank Vision Fund Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Sequoia Capital. Total funding is now $410 million.
Cohesity's funding, growth and partner momentum certainly sounds impressive. But it's important to keep the figures in perspective. As a privately held business, the company does not reveal actual revenues or profits. Also, the percentage growth rates for partner business may be a bit misleading -- since most channel partners are likely just getting started with Cohesity.
All that said, the anecdotal evidence suggests Cohesity truly is in growth mode -- with partners actively driving the business forward.
Additional reporting by Ty Trumbull.
