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Cohesity focuses channel efforts
Firm takes steps to make life easier for partners and arm them with the skills to offer data management as a service
The decision by a vendor to bring their channel activities under one umbrella is often described as a move made to improve life for partners, and that is the precise ambition at Cohesity.
Intel started the year by making the move, and others, including Lexmark, have also done so in the recent past, as they look to increase efficiency across their ecosystems.
The data specialist has historically operated with some of its different partner functions operating separately, with alliances, service providers and global system integrators all largely being dealt with in siloes, but that has changed, with a decision to pull everything under one umbrella.
Cohesity will be talking more about its global partner efforts at the Connect event happening next week, as it updates the channel on its strategy.
The decision to have a unified approach comes at a time when customers are also putting demands on partners that often spark the need for greater collaboration and more of a joined-up approach.
“We’re seeing a lot more demand in terms of customers wanting to procure in a variety of ways, and obviously we’ve got a multitude of offerings: the on-premise offering, the cloud positioning that we’ve always had, and now we’ve got data management as a service,” said Liam Bray, channel development manager for UK&I at Cohesity.
“We’re finding that the kind of the requests from the partner, what the customer is wanting, is often to acquire on one or two different routes to market,” he said, adding that traditional partners were building out their managed services practices and evolving their offerings.
Data management as a service
Driving a lot of those changes is the rising interest in data management as a service (DMaaS). Cohesity has been working with AWS on that front, something that Bray said would be the main focus for the immediate future.
“That kind of data management piece is key for us going across the next six months, and it will be driven by DMaaS, and certainly the offering that we’ve got,” he said, adding that it had been offering backup as a service and already seen a good uptake with partners.
Bray also said Cohesity was working to identify partners that would take DMaaS naturally to market, but was also open to signing up managed service players that might not have worked with the company before.
“We have seen partners wanting to sign up on that basis – maybe a bit more of a managed service kind of practice – and seeing the offer and wanting to essentially have it in that portfolio,” he said. “It’s something they can offer out to their user base as well. There’s definitely been interest from that side, and also from larger partners as well.”
In terms of the impact of the move to bring things together, the firm has already seen results, with a 20% increase in the number of active partners and double-digit hikes on the system integrator and system partner front.
