It was only a matter of time before a new watch list came out naming the 10 hottest storage companies. After all, the storage market itself is red hot! At the end of last year, worldwide enterprise storage revenue was up 13.7 percent to just under $13.6 billion, and more growth is on the way.
With that storage momentum in mind, NetworkWorld published a roundup of the 10 hot storage companies to watch, and included Cohesity near the top of the list. Editors spotlighted startups that offer “hybrid-cloud storage, tiered caching, zero data loss after recovery, and even distributed storage on free disk space”.
This list is timely, as our thought leaders have been busy writing about data center transformation for secondary applications and data. Here are couple of recent examples:
- Why Secondary is First for Cohesity (Mohit Aron, CEO)
- Is Eighty Percent of Your Data Really Secondary? (Mike Riley, Principal Technologist, Global Sales)
As for NetworkWorld’s “10 hot storage companies to watch“, here’s what editors had to say about Cohesity:
What they do: Hyper-converged secondary storage.
Year founded: 2013
Funding: $160M
Headquarters: San Jose, CA
CEO: Mohit Aron, who previously co-founded and served as CTO for Nutanix.
Problem they solve: As both the volume and variety of enterprise data grow exponentially, enterprises struggle to keep up. Until recently, enterprise IT handled different use cases with separate storage solutions, each built with its own proprietary hardware, user interface and licensing model. Unfortunately, this approach led to fragmented data siloes that have become operationally inefficient and too complex to effectively manage.
Then, to move data to the public cloud, many organizations must deploy yet another silo in the form of a cloud gateway.
How they solve it: Cohesity’s storage platform transforms complex infrastructures by eliminating secondary storage siloes, such as backups, test/dev copies, files, analytics data and objects with a web-scale hyper-converged platform.
The Cohesity DataPlatform consolidates all of an enterprise’s on-premises and cloud-based secondary storage silos onto a centralized hyper-converged platform. The platform also incorporates data management functions for converged data protection, in-place analytics and copy data management to automate DevOps workflows.
Customers include: AutoNation, University of California-Santa Barbara.
Why they’re a startup to watch: Of the 20 finalists, Cohesity had the third-highest amount of VC funding at $160M, and they finished in the top 5 in the online voting challenge.
The startup is targeting a massive market. According to IDC, “worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 10.8% year-over-year to $2.99 billion during the third quarter of 2017.” G2M Research predicts that by 2021 the NVMe market will expand to $60 billion.
Cohesity has the leadership team, VC war chest and early customer traction to compete for a sizable chunk of that market, which is still in the land-grab phase.
