How a Budding OEM Relationship Between HPE and Cohesity Brings the Best of Startup Innovation to Global Reach and Support

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How a Budding OEM Relationship
Between HPE and Cohesity Brings
the Best of Startup Innovation
to Global Reach and Support
Transcript of a discussion on how edge-centric data and compute require a management lifecycle
capability at the edge and how a tag team of startup and global vendor are building such a
solution.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation
success stories.
Our next partnership innovation discussion explores how the best of startup culture and
innovation can be married to the global reach, maturity, and solutions breadth of a major
IT provider.
Stay with us now as we unpack the budding relationship between an upstart in the data
management space, Cohesity, and venerable global IT provider Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE).
To learn more about the latest in total storage efficiency
strategies and HPE’s Pathfinder program please join me
in welcoming our guests, Rob Salmon, President and
Chief Operating Officer at Cohesity in San Jose,
California. Welcome, Rob.
Rob Salmon: Thanks for having me, Dana.
Gardner: We are also here with Paul Glaser, Vice
President and Head of the Pathfinder Program at HPE.
Welcome, Paul.
Paul Glaser: Thanks, Dana, I’m happy to be here.
Gardner: Paul, how has technology innovation, the nature of startups, and the pace of
business today made a deep relationship between HPE and Cohesity the right fit for
your mutual customers?
Salmon

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Glaser: That’s an interesting question, Dana. To start,
the technology ecosystem and the startup ecosystem in
Silicon Valley, California -- as well as other tech centers
on a global basis -- fuel the fire of innovation. And so, the
ample funding that’s available to startups, the research
that’s coming out of top tier universities such as Stanford,
Carnegie Mellon, or MIT out on the East Coast, fuels a
lot of interesting ideas -- disruptive ideas that lead their
way into small startups.
The challenge for HPE as a large, global technology
player is to figure out how to tap into the ecosystem of
startups and the new disruptive technologies coming out
of the universities, as well as serial entrepreneurs, foster
and embrace that, and deliver those solutions and technologies to our customers.
Gardner: Paul, please describe the Pathfinder thesis and approach. What does it aim to
do?
Insight, investment, and solutions
Glaser: Pathfinder, at the top level is the venture capital (VC) program of HPE and can
be subdivided into three core functions. First is insight, second is investments, and third
is the solutions function. The insight component acts like a center of excellence, it keeps
a finger on the pulse, if you will, of disruptive innovation in the startup community. It
helps HPE as a whole interact with the startup community, the VC community, and
identifies and curates leading technology innovations that we can ultimately deliver to
our customers.
The second component is investments. It’s fairly straight-forward. We act like a VC firm,
taking small equity stakes in some of these startup companies.
And third, solutions. For the companies that are in our portfolio, we work with them to
make introductions to product and technical organizations inside of HPE, fostering
dialogue from a product evolution perspective and a solution perspective. We intertwine
HPE’s products and technologies with the startup technology to create one-plus-one-
equals-three. And we deliver that solution to customers and solve their challenges from
a digital transformation perspective.
Gardner: How many startup companies are we talking about? How many in a year have
typically been included in Pathfinder?
Glaser: We are a very focused program, so we align around the strategies for HPE.
Because of that close collaboration with our portfolio companies and the business units,
Glaser

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we are limited to about eight investments or new portfolio companies on an annual
basis.
Today, the four-and-a-half-year-old program has about two dozen companies inside in
the portfolio. We expect to add another eight over the next 12 months.
Gardner: Rob, tell us about Cohesity and why it’s such a good candidate, partner, and
success story when it comes to the Pathfinder program.
Salmon: Cohesity is a five-year-old company focused on data management for about 70
to 80 percent of all the data in an enterprise today. This is for large enterprises trying to
figure out the next great thing to make them more operationally efficient, and to give
them better access to data.
Companies like HPE are doing exactly the same thing,
looking to figure out how to bring new conversations to
their customers and partners. We are a software-
defined platform. The company was founded by Dr.
Mohit Aron, who has spent his entire 20-plus-year
career working on distributed file systems. He is one of
the key architects of the Google File System and co-
founder of Nutanix. The hyperconverged infrastructure
(HCI) movement, really, was his brainchild.
He started Cohesity five years ago because he realized
there was a new, better way to manage large sets of
data. Not only in the data protection space, but for file
services, test dev, and analytics. The company has
been selling the product for more than two and a half years now, and we’ve been a
partner with Paul and the HPE Pathfinder team for more than three years now. It’s been
a quite successful partnership between the two companies.
Gardner: As I mentioned in my set-up, Rob, speed-to-value is the name of the game for
businesses today. How have HPE and Cohesity together been able to help each other
be faster to market for your customers?
One plus one equals three
Salmon: The partnership is complimentary. What HPE brings to Cohesity is experience
and reach. We get a lot of value by working with Paul, his team, and the entire executive
team at HPE to bring our product and solutions to market.
When we think about the combination between the products from HPE and Cohesity,
one-plus-one-equals-three-plus. That’s what customers are seeing as well. The largest
customers we have in the world running Cohesity solutions run on HPE’s platform.
Aron

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HPE brings credibility to a company of our size, in all areas of the world, and with large
customers. We just could not do that on our own.
Gardner: And how does working with HPE specifically get you into these markets
faster?
Salmon: In fact, we just announced an original equipment manufacturer (OEM)
relationship with HPE whereby they are selling our solutions. We’re very excited about it.
I can give you a great example. I met with one of the largest healthcare providers in the
world a year ago. They loved hearing about the solution. The question they had was,
“Rob, how are you going to handle us? How will you support us?” And they said, “You
are going to let us know, I’m sure.”
They immediately introduced me to the general manager of their account at HPE. We
took that support question right off the table. Everything has been done through HPE. It’s
our solution, wrapped around the broad support services and hardware capabilities of
HPE. That made for a total solution for our customers, because that’s ultimately what
these kinds of customers are looking for.
They are not just looking for great, new
innovative solutions. They are looking for how
they can roll that out at scale in their
environments and be assured it’s going to
work all the time.
Gardner: Paul, HPE has had huge market success in storage over the past several
years, being on the forefront of flash and of bringing intelligence to how storage is
managed on a holistic basis. How does the rest of storage, the so-called secondary
level, fit into that? Where do you see this secondary storage market’s potential?
Glaser: HPE’s internal product strategy has been around the primary storage capability.
You mentioned flash, so such brands as 3PAR and Nimble Storage. That’s where HPE
has a lot of its own intellectual property today.
On the secondary storage side, we’ve looked to partners to round out our portfolio, and
we will continue to do so going forward. Cohesity has become an important part of that
partner portfolio for us.
But we think about more than just secondary storage from Cohesity. It’s really about
data management. What does the data management lifecycle of the future look like?
How do you get more insights on where your data is? How do you better utilize that?
Cohesity and that ecosystem will be an important part of how we think about rounding
out our portfolio and addressing what is a tens of billions of dollars market opportunity for
both companies.
[Customers] are looking for how
they can roll [innovative
solutions] out at scale in their
environments and be assured it’s
going to work all the time.

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Gardner: Rob, let’s dig into that total data management and lifecycle value. What are
the drivers in the market making a holistic total approach to data necessary?
Cohesity makes data searchable, usable
Salmon: When you look at the sheer size of the datasets that enterprises are dealing
with today, there is an enormous data management copy problem. You have islands of
infrastructures set up for different use cases for secondary data and storage. Oftentimes
the end users don’t know where to look, and it may be in the wrong place. After a time,
the data has to be moved.
The Cohesity platform indexes the data on ingest. We therefore have Google-like search
capabilities across the entire platform, regardless of the use-case and how you want to
use the data.
When we think about the legacy
storage solutions out there for data
protection, for example, all you can
do is protect the data. You can’t do
anything else. You can’t glean any
insights from that data. Because of
our indexing on ingest, we are able to
provide insights into the data and metadata in ways unlike customers and enterprises
have ever seen before. As we think about the opportunity, the larger the datasets that
are run on the Cohesity platform and solution, the more insight customers can have into
their data.
And it’s not just about our own applications. We recently introduced a marketplace
where applications such as Splunk reside and can sit on top and access the data in the
Cohesity platform. It’s about bringing compute, storage, networking, and the applications
all together to where the data is, versus moving data to the compute and to the
applications.
Gardner: It sounds like a solution tailor-made for many of the new requirements we’re
seeing at the edge. That means massive amounts of data generated from the Internet of
things (IoT) and the industrial Internet of things (IIoT). What are you doing with
secondary storage and data management that aligns with the many things HPE is doing
at the edge?
Seamless at the edge
Salmon: When you think about both the edge and the public cloud, the beauty of a
next-generation solution like Cohesity is we are not redesigning something to take
Because of [the Cohesity platform]
indexing on ingest, we are able to
provide insights into the data and
metadata in ways unlike customers
and enterprises have ever seen before.

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advantage of the edge or the public clouds. We can run a virtual edition of our software
at the edge, and in public cloud. We have a multiple-cloud offering today.
So, from the edge all the way to on-premises and into public clouds it’s a seamless look
at all of your data. You have access and visibility to all of the data without moving the
data around.
Gardner: Paul, it sounds like there’s another level of alignment here, and it’s around
HPE’s product strategies. With HPE InfoSight, OneView -- managing core-to-edge
issues across multiple clouds as well as a hybrid cloud -- this all sounds quite well-
positioned. Tell us more about the product strategy synergy between HPE and Cohesity.
Glaser: Dana, I think you hit it spot-on. HPE CEO Antonio Neri talks about a strategy for
HPE that’s edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. As we think about building our
infrastructure capabilities -- both for on-premise data centers and extending out to the
edge -- we are looking for partners that can help provide that software layer, in this case
the data management capability, that extends our product portfolio across that hybrid
cloud experience for our customers.
As you think about a product strategy
for HPE, you really step up to the
macro strategy, which is, how do we
provide a solution for our customers
that allows us to span from the edge
all the way to the core data center?
We look at partners that have similar capabilities and similar visions. We work through
the OEMs and other types of partnership arrangements to embed that down into the
product portfolio.
Gardner: Rob, anything to offer additionally on the alignment between Cohesity and
HPE, particularly when it comes to the data lifecycle management?
Salmon: The partnership started with Pathfinder, and we are absolutely thrilled with the
partnership we have with HPE’s Pathfinder group. But when we did the recent OEM
partnership with HPE, it was actually with HPE’s storage business unit. That’s really
interesting because as you think about competing or not, we are working directly with
HPE’s storage group. This is very complementary to what they are doing.
We understand our swim lane. They understand our swim lane. And yet this gives HPE
a far broader portfolio into environments where they are looking at what the competitors
are doing. They are saying, “We now have a better solution for what we are up to in this
particular area by working with Cohesity.”
We are excited not just to work with the Pathfinder group but by the opportunity we have
with Antonio’s entire team. We have been welcomed into the HPE family quite well over
the last three years, and we are just getting started with the opportunity as we see it.
The macro strategy is, how do we
provide a solution for our customers
that allows us to span from the edge all
the way to the core data center?

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Gardner: Another area that is top-of-mind for businesses is not just the technology
strategy, but the economics of IT and how it’s shifted given the cloud, Software as a
Service (SaaS), and pay-on-demand models. Is there something about what HPE is
doing with its GreenLake Flex Capacity approach that is attractive to Cohesity? Do you
see the reception in your global market improved because of the opportunity to finance,
acquire, and consume IT in a variety of different ways?
Flexibility increases startups’ strength
Salmon: Without question! Large enterprises want to buy it the way they want to buy it,
whether it be for personalized licenses or a subscription model. They want to dictate how
it will be used in their environments. By working with HPE and GreenLake, we are able
to offer the flexible options required to win in this market today.
Gardner: Paul, any thoughts about the economics of consuming IT and how Pathfinder
might be attractive to more startups because of that?
Glaser: There are two points Rob touched on that are important. One, working with HPE
as a large company, it’s a journey. As a startup you are looking for that introduction or
that leg up that gives you visibility across the global HPE organization. That’s what
Pathfinder provides. So, you start working directly with the Pathfinder organization, but
then you have the ability to spread out across HPE.
For Cohesity, it’s led to the
OEM agreement with the
storage business unit. It is the
ability to leverage different
consumption models utilizing
GreenLake, and some of our
flexible pricing and flexible
consumption offers.
The second point is Amazon Web Services has conditioned customers to think about
pay-per-use. Customers are asking for that, and they are looking for flexibility. As a
startup, that sometimes is hard to figure out -- how to economically provide that
capability. Being able to partner with HPE and Pathfinder, to utilizing GreenLake or
some of our other tools, it really provides them a leg up in terms of the conversation with
customers. It helps them trust that the solution will be there and that somebody will be
there to stand behind it over the coming years.
Gardner: Before we close out, I would like to peek in the crystal ball for the future. When
you think about the alignment between Cohesity and HPE, and when we look at what we
can anticipate -- an explosion of activity at the edge and rapidly growing public cloud
market -- there is a gorilla in the room. It’s the new role for inference and artificial
intelligence (AI), to bring more data-driven analytics to more places more rapidly.
As a startup, you are looking for that
introduction or that leg up that gives you
visibility across the global HPE organization.
That’s what Pathfinder provides.

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Any thoughts about where the relationship between HPE and Cohesity will go on an AI
tangent product strategy?
AI, ML to enhance data management partnership
Salmon: You touched earlier, Dana, on HPE InfoSight, and we are really excited about
the opportunity to partner even closer with HPE on it. That’s an incredibly successful
product in its own right. The opportunity for us to work closer and do some things
together around InfoSight is exciting.
On the Cohesity side, we talk a lot about not just AI but machine learning (ML) and
where we can go proactively to give customers insights into not only the data, but also
the environment itself. It can be very predictive. We are working incredibly hard on that
right now. And again, I think this is an area that is really just getting started in terms of
what we are going to be able to do over a long period of time.
Gardner: Paul, anything to offer on the AI future?
Glaser: Rob touched on the immediate opportunity for the two companies to work
together, which is around HPE InfoSight and marrying our capabilities in terms of
predictability and ML around IT infrastructure and creative solutions around that.
As you extend the vision to
being edge-centric, as you look
into the future where
applications become more
edge-centric and compute is
going to move toward the data
at the edge, the lifecycle of
what that data looks like from a
data management perspective
at the edge and where it ultimately resides is going to become an interesting opportunity.
Some of the AI capabilities can provide insight on where the best place is for that
computation, and for that data, to live. I think that will be interesting down the road.
Gardner: Rob, for other startups that might be interested in working with a big vendor
like HPE through a program like Pathfinder, any advice that you can offer?
Salmon: As a startup, you know you are good at something, and it’s typically around the
technology itself. You may have a founder like Mohit Aron, who is absolutely brilliant in
his own right in terms of what he has already done in the industry and what we are going
to continue to do. But you have got to do all the building around that brilliance and that
technology and turn it into a true solution.
And again, back to this notion of solution, the solution needs global scale, it’s giving the
support to costumers, not just one experience with you, but what they are expecting to
As you look into the future where applications
become more edge-centric and compute is
going to move toward the data at the edge,
the lifecycle of what that data looks like from
a data management perspective at the edge
and where it ultimately resides is going to
become an interesting opportunity.

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experience from the enterprises that support them. You can learn a lot from working with
large enterprises. They may not be the ones to tell you exactly how you are going to
code your product; we have got that figured out with the brilliance of a Mohit and the
engineering team around him. But as we think about getting to scale, and scaling the
operation in terms of what we are doing, leaning on someone like the Pathfinder group
at HPE has helped us an awful lot.
Salmon: The other great thing about working with the Pathfinder group is, as Paul
touched on earlier, they work with other portfolio companies. They are working with
companies that may be in a little different space than we are, but they are seeing a
similar challenge as we are.
How do you grow? How do you open up a market?
How do you look at bringing the product to market
in different ways? We talked about consumption
pricing and the new consumption models. Since
they are experiencing that with others, and what
they have already done at HPE, we can benefit
from that experience. So leveraging a large
enterprise like an HPE and the Pathfinder group,
for what they know and what they are good at, has
been invaluable to Cohesity.
Gardner: Paul, for those organizations that might want to get involved with Pathfinder,
where should they go and what would you guide them to in terms of becoming a
potential fit?
Glaser: I’d just point them to hewlettpackardpathfinder.com. You can find information on
the program there, contact information, portfolio companies, and that type of thing.
We also put out a set of perspectives that talk about some of our investment theses and
you can see our areas of interest. So at a high level, we look for companies that are
aligned to HPE’s core strategies, which is going to be around building up the hybrid IT
business as well as the intelligent edge.
So we have those specific swim lanes from a strategic perspective. And then second is
we are looking for folks who have demonstrated success from a product perspective,
and so whether that’s a couple of initial customer wins and then needing help to scale
that business, those are the types of opportunities that we are looking for.
Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been discussing how the
best of startup culture and innovation can be married to the global reach, maturity, and
solutions perspective of a major IT supplier. And we learned about the increasingly deep
and beneficial relationship between an upstart in the data management space, Cohesity,
and the venerable IT vendor, HPE.
Leveraging a large
enterprise like an HPE and
the Pathfinder group, for
what they know and what
they are good at, has been
invaluable to Cohesity.

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So please join me now in thanking our guests, Rob Salmon, President and COO at
Cohesity. Thank you so much, Rob.
Salmon: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you to Paul Glaser, Vice President and Head of the Pathfinder
Program at HPE. Thank you, sir.
Glaser: Thank you, Dana. Appreciate your time.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect
Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard
Enterprise-sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and don’t forget
to come back next time. For more information on Cohesity-HPE joint solutions, refer to
www.cohesity.com/hpe.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how edge-centric data and compute require a management lifecycle
capability at the edge and how a tag team of startup and global vendor are building such a
solution. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.
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How a Budding OEM Relationship Between HPE and Cohesity Brings the Best of Startup Innovation to Global Reach and Support

How a Budding OEM Relationship Between HPE and Cohesity Brings the Best of Startup Innovation to Global Reach and Support

How a Budding OEM Relationship Between HPE and Cohesity Brings the Best of Startup Innovation to Global Reach and Support

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How a Budding OEM Relationship Between HPE and Cohesity Brings the Best of Startup Innovation to Global Reach and Support