Data center News
New Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen: ‘Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants’
Joseph F. Kovar
‘I have always sort of dreamed of having a technologist who I could partner with. I know certain products and product management and technology. But I also have a lot of experience and skills in go-to-market. I don‘t think this combination exists with anybody else in the data management space, where you’ve got an incredible technologist and a powerful go-to-market combination,’ says Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen in reference to Cohesity co-founder Mohit Aron.
You worked at Veritas 16 years ago. From that time until now, the storage industry has changed a lot. What are some of the big differences that you see in the storage industry compared to back then, and how does that fit with what Cohesity is doing?
I‘m not the expert in the storage industry. I would say I have some ideas about it. [But] I’ll give you a few of my instincts. Clearly, there is a significant move of storage to the cloud, and cloud storage is getting better, faster, cheaper in a variety of forms. I‘ve seen the growth of [Amazon] S3 and slower forms of storage like [Amazon] Glacier and their equivalents, and various different blob and block storage options in the public clouds.
The second trend is certainly the bigger push towards hyperconverged infrastructure, which I certainly saw and advocated for at VMware with vSAN and VxRail in partnership with Dell. And now I get to also partner with Nutanix, because they’re no longer a competitor of mine at Cohesity.
And third, I would say, I was beginning to track a number of open source projects like MinIO and others who are really doing some creative things. The community was starting to really develop options for ways by which storage can leverage on-prem or in the cloud in cheaper, faster, better ways. So all of those then led to use cases that could even scale better and faster for databases, data warehousing, analytics, and the stacks above that, whether it was Snowflake or some traditional databases or next-generation open source databases that are going to be able to take advantage of those storage attributes.
I think the security industry hasn‘t really done as much with data security. They’re focused on network security and endpoint security. So data security, and the increased focus on ransomware was an opportunity for digital security, for storage companies including Cohesity to start developing some security chops, too.
So those are some of the things I saw as major trends. I‘m not the expert in storage, but those are three or four things that certainly influenced my thinking as I come into this company.
