How Cohesity’s Aspire Partner Program Is Shaping The Channel

Data security is one of the biggest challenges customers face, and by extension, their partners. After acquiring the Veritas enterprise data protection business, Cohesity has become one of the largest players in this space, supporting nearly 70 percent of the Global 500. Now, with the Aspire Partner Program, the company is putting partners at the center.

Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen speaks with CRNtv host Sydney Neely about what this means for the channel.

Sydney: Sanjay, before we get into the acquisition and new program, set the stage for us. What is Cohesity’s mission right now, and how does it shape the way you look at the market?

Sanjay: We are the leader in AI-powered data security. We protect the world’s largest brands in many verticals like banking, healthcare, retail and manufacturing from cyberattacks. But we also help them glean information from the data that we protect. Our mission is to protect, secure and provide insights into the world’s data. We are very proud that the largest brands in the world rely on us for their cyber resilience.

Sydney: And part of that mission came into focus with the Veritas acquisition. Now that you have brought together both product portfolios, what should partners expect to see in terms of continuity and opportunity?

Sanjay: It is one of the most exciting deals in our industry. Data protection number seven combining with number two catapults us to number one.

What we are now doing is ensuring that the products work very well together. We have announced a very bold roadmap. There is a public video that I released a few months ago that explains how the NetBackup product, which came from Veritas, will sit on top of our file system. The integration is going ahead of plan in many cases, and we are very excited about how the combined portfolio will deliver a best-of-breed experience.

In that video, I made it clear that a backup running on top of our file system with a unified user experience is the way a NetBackup customer gets enormous innovation for the future, with no customer left behind. For a net-new customer or existing Cohesity customer, you are getting all the incredible engineering that the Veritas team has been building, with their engineers now working alongside ours as a much bigger team focused on innovation, bigger and faster.

We now have about twice the engineering capacity and investment of any of our competitors, which allows us to move not only bigger but also faster.

Sydney: You also just introduced the Aspire Partner Program. What makes this program different, and what are the key benefits partners will see?

Sanjay: We have been a partner-led, partner-first company for more than 10 years, whether it is value-added resellers, distributors or cloud partners. Some of our partners are also investors in our company, which is a very special relationship.

For example, Nvidia made an investment in our company. They are the king of AI and picked one company to invest in: Cohesity. Amazon Web Services is an investor in us. Google, HPE, Cisco and now IBM are also investors. We have strong partnerships across hardware and cloud.

In this Aspire Partner Program, we have taken the best of both programs from Cohesity and Veritas and designed an optimized program especially for VARs, distributors and the channel partners your audience listens to. It is more attractive than anything we have had before. We took input from partners and both existing programs, and this new program allows them to make even more money.

We will never change our roots of being channel- and partner-led.

Sydney: With Aspire rolling out, let’s take a look at what is ahead. How do you see this partner-first approach helping resellers stand out and grow in a really competitive market?

Sanjay: It is a competitive market, but now that we have catapulted ourselves from number seven to number one and have the Who’s Who of the Global 500, you can see why partners want to work with us.

We are focused on 10 industries. In financial services, we are extremely strong, and there is almost no bank that does not rely on us. From there, we go to public sector as the second largest, along with technology firms, healthcare including payers, providers and pharma, and then manufacturing, retail and telecommunications. We have a very strong presence across these verticals.

We have about 3,000 partners around the world, with key partners in every region. They get the benefit of this new Aspire Partner Program, which I believe is the best in the industry. It was inspired by partner feedback and built on our success with 13,000 customers.

Partners can replicate that success with new customers or expand with existing ones. Our customer satisfaction is the highest in this industry, and those 13,000 customers want to continue expanding with us because they like us. You take any of those banks, and we can let partners participate in that expansion opportunity too.

For partners, the takeaway is clear: Cohesity is putting you at the center with a model designed to make it easier to do business and open new opportunities. To learn more, visit cohesity.com/partners.