Cohesity Intros Pay-per-use Data Management For MSPs

The new consumption-based pricing model, along with some other new capabilities, are aimed at helping MSPs more easily bring new services such as disaster recovery-as-a-service to clients who find it difficult to plan their capacity requirements into the future.

Data protection and management technology developer Cohesity on Tuesday unveiled a new pay-per-use subscription model targeting managed service providers looking to help clients cut the up-front costs of their data infrastructure and turn part of that cost into an operating expense.

The company also unveiled new technologies aimed at helping service providers improve how they work with clients.

Cohesity's new pay-per-use subscription model comes as Cohesity continues to show momentum in the service provider market, said Ari Paul, head of global service providers for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

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This includes doubling the number of service providers it works with in the last three months, seeing double-digit and triple-digit quarter-over-quarter service provider growth in the last three quarters, and the closing of a $250-million round of funding, Paul told CRN.

"Now we're making it even more cost-effective to work with Cohesity, and adding new capabilities for multi-tenant service providers," he said.

The new subscription model lets service providers sign up for a certain monthly commitment based on the number of terabytes of data protected, said David Kosman, head of Cohesity's global service provider business. Partners sign one-year contracts with a minimum of $2,000 per month, with higher commitments leading to lower per-terabyte pricing, Kosman told CRN.

"We charge the same for the committed volume and for overages," he said. "We're pretty flexible."

The commitment is on a per-service provider basis to aggregate across all the partner's tenants, Kosman said.

Cohesity is also providing service provider partners with a ramp-up period during which they can gradually grow their commitment while they understand their clients' requirements, he said.

Cohesity's new pay-per-use subscription model is important to channel partners, said Rodney Giles, president of NetDepot, a Houston-based cloud services provider and MSP which uses Cohesity's technology as the base for its disaster recovery-as-a-service offering.

Clients are increasingly expecting and demanding cloud-like billing modules, and looking to move away from sales models that require purchasing enough capacity or licenses to meet predicted needs over the next three to five years, Giles told CRN.

Giles said that there are several vendors that offer pay-for-use models, but that Cohesity has made its program stand out in large part by not locking customers into long-term contracts.

"This is important for planning," he said. "It's tough to forecast usage and consumption five years out. Consumption-based billing is key to making data protection simpler."

NetDepot has been working with Cohesity's pay-per-use subscription model since October on a beta testing basis, and found it to be a good program, which was the key factor in the company's decision to make Cohesity a key vendor partner, Giles said.

In addition to the new pay-per-use subscription model, Cohesity added a number of new capabilities targeting its service providers, Paul said.

The company simplified how its disaster recovery-as-a-service offering is deployed in multi-tenant environments to help partners more quickly deliver the services, he said.

"Most clients start out with backup-as-a-service," he said. "But we now support failover from multiple source clusters to a single target as part of a disaster recovery service."

Cohesity is also now supporting heterogeneous clusters, which can combine nodes from multiple vendors instead of requiring all the nodes be the same, Paul said.

"This sets service providers optimize their capabilities by combining Cisco, Dell, HPE, and our own Cohesity nodes in a cluster," he said.

Also new is improved visibility into user statistics and health monitoring of Cohesity environments via the company’s Cohesity Helios global SaaS-based application management platform, he said.