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Cohesity and AWS tie-up will add options for partners
Storage player has shared the implications for its partners from the strategic collaboration it has announced with the cloud giant
Cohesity has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer data management-as-a-service (DMaaS) and moved quickly to underline its commitment to partners.
The partnership between the firms, announced earlier this week, will see them bring a DMaaS offering to the market to address the needs of enterprise and mid-size customers looking for ways to backup, secure and analyse their data.
Cohesity’s EMEA channel leader Martin Gibbons said that the strategic relationship would add more options for its partners.
“Cohesity solutions provide customers with secure, reliable, scalable and enterprise-ready data management capabilities on-premise,” he said. “With DMaaS, partners have an easy way to provide those same capabilities as part of a cloud-based service, at a time when more and more organisations are asking for as-a-service solutions.
“Partners can now expand their existing managed service offerings without having to build out infrastructure themselves. Or, they can use this as an entry point if they are thinking about starting a managed service practice,” he added.
The AWS tie-up was expected to meet the needs of mid market customers, but the ambition was to also work with larger customers.
“We expect most traction in the mid-market to start and will likely move up market to enterprise as we build out our capabilities and certifications,” said Gibbons. “There is definite interest from large enterprise customers that wish to spin-up support of data protection for departments that they wouldn’t normally have the ability to support.”
Message not diluted
The offering is available in the UK in the first half of next year, and Gibbons was keen to stress that the collaboration with AWS in no way diluted its channel message.
“As with all other Cohesity solutions, channel partners have the opportunity to sell the DMaaS offerings, such as Cohesity DataProtect, delivered as a service,” he said. “Cohesity, is, was, and will be a 100% channel-sold business.”
The firm’s channel will have a couple of ways of engaging with the DMaaS offering. The vendor is adding it as a SKU on its price list so there is an option to order via a distributor through the standard quote and order process.
“Partner compensation will be from the margin they make on the deal,” said Gibbons. “The standard Cohesity opportunity registration process is used for Cohesity DMaaS opportunities transacted with both the Cohesity standard quote and order process and on the AWS Marketplace. Partners can submit opportunity registration requests on the Cohesity Partner Portal.
“The second option is for partners to participate in the AWS Marketplace Private Offer process. In this purchase flow, Amazon will pay the partner the amount agreed upon in the Private Offer that is associated with the deal.”
He added that more details of the specifics would be made available closer to the launch next year.
AWS was also upbeat about the tie-up because of the added options that could be offered on the data management front. Doug Yeum, head of worldwide channels and alliances at Amazon Web Services, said: “Working with Cohesity, we are charting a new course in how data is managed in an as a service model, leveraging disruptive, modern data management capabilities from Cohesity, and industry-leading cloud services from AWS.”
