Listening to Customers about Pure Storage

Early Customer Success

Cohesity has literally only just begun helping enterprise customers. Our first product went GA in November 2015. So far, the customer response to our category establishing hyperconverged secondary storage platform has exceeded expectations.

As our founder and CEO Mohit Aron recently observed, “What Cohesity has achieved with enterprise customer adoption in two quarters took my previous startup, Nutanix, nearly three years…”

So why is this? Are there any early trends we can point to?

Cohesity went out on a mission to listen and learn from its customers. It is early, but one clear observation why Cohesity is winning also points to why customers are also adopting a new, but entirely different storage platform _ Pure. Large enterprise customers appear to be both considering and adopting Pure + Cohesity often, and at an ever increasing pace!

Listening to What Customers Have to Say

In a trusted relationship with a customer, you can learn plenty if you listen to what they have to say. Here’s a few consistent things we’ve learned at Cohesity from some of our early adopters of our platform on what enterprises need today as compared to traditional alternatives:

• Need #1 _ Smart & Innovative: _Traditional IT infrastructure is out_dated and is not designed to best meet today’s business needs which require performance and results that were not imagined even just a few years ago.
• Need #2 _ Cost_Effective & Simple: _Legacy solutions create silos that are expensive and complex to run and manage.
• Need #3 _ Transformational: _Business demands require open, purpose_built solutions for cloud, analytics, mobile and rapid application development and not proprietary product add_ons.

For me, a key but not_so_obvious take_away is that these three needs directly reflect the core tenets and value propositions of Pure Storage. Heck, if you go to Pure’s website these are directly reflected in the “Why Pure” section. If I am really listening to Cohesity customers, they are telling me to take notes from Pure!

Although different in philosophy and design (100% flash vs. hyperconvergence), Pure and Cohesity are platforms that were conceived by visionary founders that did not allow any traditional thinking to interfere with creating next generation products that work better than what most IT has been doing for the past 25_years.

Taking Customer Feedback to Action:
Cohesity/Pure Joint Development

The old saying that “The Customer is Always Right” definitely has merit, so I am not sure what a new saying should be when you have 100+ Pure customers with active Cohesity pursuits telling you pretty much the identical thing in meeting after meeting. All I can say is…

Attention all customers…Cohesity is listening!!!

Between now and the end of 2016, Cohesity is working with Pure to deliver multiple advanced capabilities _ all of which come from repeated direct enterprise customer feedback:

• Tight Integration: _Increased technical integration, first around Oracle then VMware and SQL
• Optimized Solutions: _Multiple joint solutions, with the first four being:
  • Seamless snapshot integration
  • Optimized end_to_end data protection
  • Industry leading TCO for primary and secondary storage
  • Integrated cloud capabilities
• Customer Investment:_ Customer enablement and events where large enterprises can learn more about the benefits and best practices of leveraging Cohesity and Pure to realize:
  • Need #1 _ Smart & Innovative i_nfrastructure that delivers performance and results that were not imagined even just a few years ago.
  • Need #2 _ Cost_Effective & Simple_primary and secondary storage solutions that are easy to use and significantly cheaper than legacy systems.
  • Need #3 _ Transformational: _software capability that meets today’s business demands to require open, purpose_built solutions for cloud, analytics, mobile and rapid application development and not proprietary product add_ons.

How can Cohesity Help You?

In extending the “listening” theme of this blog post, Cohesity would like to listen and learn from you about your enterprise IT needs and how Cohesity, and its partners like Pure Storage, can position your business for success in the future.