Transcript
Hello everyone, Sanjay Poonen here, President and CEO of Cohesity. I'm excited today to be talking to my good friend, Matt Hicks, whom I've known for many years. He's President and CEO of Red Hat. We've been friends since my VMware days, and they're doing some incredible work at Red Hat as the best platform for virtualization and containers, and we're excited about the partners we're having today. I want to first off congratulate Matt on all the success Red Hat is having inside IBM. That whole story of virtualization and containers with OpenShift is growing. The recent results in your quarter, Matt, were fabulous, and I'm excited about taking the best in data protection and data security with the best in virtualization and containers. Thanks, Sanjay. It has certainly been a great year, and we're equally excited about the opportunity ahead of us. You know, we've been focused on the benefits of hybrid cloud for almost a decade at this point, but changes in virtualization and technology shifts in AI have made it really an imperative for enterprises across every industry. And our platform approach allows customers to run and manage both virtualization and containers efficiently and securely in a single operating environment. So this lets them not just maintain the environments running their business today, but also invest in building what's going to run their business tomorrow. Well, Matt, let's take the discussion a little further. From my experience in the infrastructure industry, I saw a lot of that virtualization container stack. And it's amazing as customers think about how they cloud nativize and how they build microservices and modernize their applications, how that discussion has gone, really progressed, whether it's on-premise or in the cloud. What are you seeing, Matt, as the drivers for Red Hat's success and growth? You know, Sanjay, just like you're seeing that opportunity in virtualization with customers with Cohesity, we see the same opportunity as customers are really having a compelling event where they have to pick their platform for virtualization going forward. Now, our value prop, one of the areas that's driving growth for us is we don't look at virtualization separately. We're able to run virtualization next to cloud native apps and actually is a great setup to processing AI going forward. That multi-workload, especially in multi-environments supporting multi-cloud, is a key driver and capability for our customers. And much like with Cohesity and protecting data, virtualization data is certainly critical for customers. I would argue that AI data going forward will be even more critical. So I think your ability to span across their data needs, our ability to span across their operating environment and runtime needs, brings that value really clearly to customers. Exactly, Matt. And this is why we're super excited about our partnership with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the Cohesity Data Protection Platform, both Data Protect and NetBackup. There's three areas that I'd like to highlight that we're excited about. First off, our platform runs on the Red Hat Linux platform, and that allows customers to get the modernness of your platform, all of the aspects of safety, security, and all the innovation that you're bringing to the core Red Hat Linux platform. Secondly, IBM, your parent company, did an exclusive OEM of our product, Data Protect, as they've modernized Tivoli Spectrum Protect in a product that's now called Defender Data Protect that we're taking together through them to the IBM customers. And that's incredibly exciting. That momentum is great. IBM also chose to invest as an equity investor inside Cohesity, so we're excited about what we can do with both Red Hat and IBM. And thirdly, over 50% of our customers, Matt, are actually now betting on what we're finding on Red Hat, whether it's the core Linux platform, whether it's Red Hat Virtualization, whether it's OpenShift containers, Ansible playbooks, or pacemaker clusters for physical virtual environments. This is an incredible playbook now that we can take to many of our joint customers. And I can't wait to actually go on the road with you, virtually or physically, and talk to customers about how Cohesity and Red Hat are bringing great innovation to our joint customers. Cohesity definitely delivers exceptional value to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization customers by combining the simplicity and streamlined operations by your industry-leading cyber resilience capabilities. And the Cohesity platform, running on Red Hat, and we've designed around zero-trust principles, and you offer the robust security features like the immutability, strict access controls, or cleanroom technology, gives customers one of the most comprehensive resilience platforms against sophisticated cybersecurity attacks. And I think really the value that we see in customers is, it's not just simplifying data management, but it's giving them that peace of mind of security that lets them focus on the areas they're going to invest and build their business going forward, not worried about what might happen to their data when they're not booking. So Sanjay, with Cohesity's recent acquisition of Veritas' enterprise data protection portfolio, your company has now become the leading data security company in the world. What does this acquisition mean for your customers? Yes, indeed. This is an exciting time for our industry, for our customers, as the new Cohesity takes shape with the combination of Veritas. We're now a over 5,000-employee base. We've got 2x the R&D of many of our competitors, over 13,000 customers with 85% of the Fortune 100, 70% of the Global 500, and a passion for innovation. We want to be one of those biggest companies, certainly the leader in our space, but that innovates and is also obsessed with customers. So I'm super excited about that mission, but I'm also excited about working alongside partners like Red Hat. We have some of the best ecosystem partners in every area, and this is an example of two best-of-breed companies coming together to serve customers. We're looking forward. Our engineers are working really closely on driving each other's platform further, and that's the kind of stuff that gets me excited. Thanks Sanjay. These really are exciting times to be in technology. You know, when you look at the expansion of hybrid, multi-cloud running applications in your data center, in your clouds, at the edge, having the robust data security posture, I think is one of the most critical things customers are going to need, and I couldn't be more enthusiastic about our partnership. So I'm really confident, both in our ability to deliver value to customers today, as well as tomorrow, and I really appreciate you having me here today and looking forward to see what we can do in 2025. Well, Matt, let me close by just saying thank you for being here with me in this video and talking to our joint customers and partners. We have an incredible mission at Cohesity to protect, secure, and provide insights into the world's data so that our customers get cyber resilience. And I know you're also focused on modernizing and helping the customer base have an incredible experience with their applications in the environments, whether it's on-premise in the cloud. This is going to be an exciting time as we work together to make our customers enormously successful but also keep their data safe.
