Inside Our Portfolio: Q&A with Cohesity's Kit Beall

Welcome to the latest edition of our series, "Inside Our Portfolio", where we engage in insightful conversations with leaders from our portfolio companies. This series aims to provide you with firsthand perspectives from those at the forefront of innovation and growth.

In this issue, Paul Glaser (Head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder and Investor Relations) interviews Kit Beall, the Chief Revenue Officer of Cohesity, a key startup in our portfolio since 2017, with whom we have built a successful joint go-to-market partnership.

PG: What does Cohesity do?

KB: Cohesity enables companies to secure, protect, and extract value from their data wherever it exists—across the data center, edge, and cloud. Our focus is on helping customers mitigate cybersecurity threats and recover quickly from disruptions, making their businesses more resilient. Customers trust Cohesity because of our speed, security, simplicity, scale, and smarts. We also have the fastest speed of cyber recovery of any data protection vendor, allowing our customers to return to normal business operations quickly.

We also continue evolving with new security capabilities for the Cohesity Data Cloud, and ways to derive insight from data, like our first-to-market AI-powered enterprise search assistant, Cohesity Gaia.

PG: How has Cohesity’s business evolved, and what are you working on today?

KB: Over a decade ago, data was highly fragmented across multiple silos, and there was little innovation in the backup space, so customers were managing backup products that didn’t scale and were hard to recover data from. Cohesity was founded with the idea that you could dramatically simplify customers’ lives by simplifying data management and modernizing backups and data protection. With that vision at our core, we architected a platform so that customers could secure their data, manage it, and do more by harnessing that data to drive insights - all in one place and on one platform.

We’ve continued to evolve our platform over the last ten years, embracing things like powerful security features to make it easier to find threats and more quickly to recover from incidents. Recently, we expanded our AI solutions to embrace Retrieval Augmented Generation to power Cohesity Gaia, our first-to-market AI-powered enterprise search assistant. That core vision from a decade ago is still our vision today, and it's the reason we continue to push to disrupt the industry with modern innovations to change further how organizations harness their data's power.

PG: What are the biggest challenges you see in data security and management today, and how is Cohesity addressing them?

KB: Cyber threats such as ransomware continue to proliferate unchecked, with many estimates indicating ransomware attacks are happening at a rate of 20 per second. Worse yet, it takes over 270 days on average to identify and recover from a data breach. The Cohesity Data Cloud, built on zero-trust principles, ensures data immutability and instant availability in the event of any disruption, including a ransomware attack, so customers can recover quickly and resume operations. When attacks happen at such an unprecedented rate, somebody will overrun even the most robust preventative security, and customers can’t afford to have their operations impacted for 270 days. Customers trust Cohesity to help them meet these threats to their business operations head-on because our platform is easy to use, has the strongest security capabilities, and offers the fastest speed of cyber recovery of any data protection vendor. For example, after a ransomware attack, Spring Independent School District was able to recover its virtual servers in less than 12 hours, ensuring teachers could continue online classes the very next day and payroll was processed on time, despite their local servers being locked by the attack..

PG: Can you provide examples or case studies where customers have significantly benefited from using Cohesity?

KB: Over 700 HPE customers rely on Cohesity and HPE’s joint solution to defend against cybersecurity threats. These customers seek robust data security and management and seamless integration with HPE’s technology to achieve greater operational efficiency and cyber resilience. Riverside Healthcare, a fully integrated healthcare system serving patient needs throughout five counties in Illinois, lowered its TCO by 30% using the joint solution. Through our seamless integration with HPE, Riverside can move data rapidly in its environment, enabling the IT team to significantly beat its SLAs for its Epic electronic health records system software. While Epic suggests an SLA for restores of four hours for 1 TB, Riverside can restore nearly 3 TB in under four hours using Cohesity.

Proliance Surgeons, a mid-sized network of 35 surgical care centers operating in 100 physical locations, chose the integrated HPE-Cohesity solution because of its consolidated, single platform, which can support multiple data management use cases—including backups, archives, file shares, object stores, and data used in analytics and dev/test. They’re saving $25,000 a year from decreased data center costs and have gained roughly 100 hours of staff productivity while reducing their data recovery time from 75 - 120 hours to 24 hours.

We talk a lot about the 5 Ss of why customers pick Cohesity - speed, security, simplicity, scale, and smarts. These attributes are only amplified in our partnership with HPE, and that’s shown time and again by Riverside Healthcare, Proliance Surgeons, and the hundreds of joint customers we serve every day.

PG: Congratulations on being named the HPE Global Momentum Technology Partner of the Year 2024! How does this recognition reflect Cohesity’s relationship with HPE and its impact on customers?

KB: Thanks! It’s truly an honor to be recognized in this way.

Cohesity and HPE help organizations defend against cybersecurity threats by combining Cohesity’s robust data security and management capabilities with HPE’s industry-leading security innovations built in from silicon to cloud. By seamlessly integrating with HPE’s technology, we’re providing our over 700 joint customers with a unified experience with a single pane of glass that simplifies their data security and management tasks. That’s driving operational efficiency. IDC estimates our joint customers spend 45% less time detecting threats and realize a 233% three-year return on investment. We recently discussed the benefits of our joint solution with IDC, which is available as an on-demand replay here. Being named HPE Global Momentum Technology Partner of the Year validates what we set out to achieve in partnering with HPE - making it easier for customers to protect their most valuable asset: their data!

Interested in more insights from leaders across our portfolio? Check out our previous "Inside Our Portfolio" interviews in previous issues of our newsletter:

• Interview with Nir Minerbi, the CEO and co-founder of Classiq, a leading quantum software company

• Interview with Dimitri Sirota, the CEO of BigID, a security and compliance software start-up for the cloud and hybrid cloud.

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