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Cohesity service providers gain pay-per-use pricing

Cohesity's new pricing model lets cloud and managed service providers consume the company's data management offerings based on a commitment as low as $2,000 per month.

John Moore
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Published: 16 Jun 2020

Data management vendor Cohesity Inc. has introduced a pay-per-use pricing model for its service provider partners.

The new pricing option comes amid updates to the company's partner program, which Cohesity launched in October 2018, and is available across Cohesity's roster of data protection and management services. To participate in the pay-per-use program, Cohesity service providers make a monthly commitment over an annual term. The commitment is structured as tiers, with the bottom tier available at $2,000 per month and the top tier offered at slightly more than $80,000 a month. Service providers can obtain better per-terabyte pricing the higher they commit, noted David Kosman, head of service provider business at Cohesity.

The pay-per-use method lets service providers avoid buy capacity upfront as well as the risk of overprovisioning. With an upfront subscription, "the risk is on them to drive consumption and use of the service," Kosman noted. Alternatively, underprovisioning can put service providers in a bind if a customer is suddenly ready to purchase additional capacity. Cohesity's new approach offers a pricing model "more in line with actual usage," creating an easier path for service providers in the market, he said.

Service provider considerations

The pay-per-use program is tailored to Cohesity service providers in two ways. Kosman said service providers have cited the need for a ramp-up period because it takes time to deploy and test Cohesity's offerings and then develop a sales pipeline. Cohesity's program offers a "welcome period" of one to six months, depending on the type of go-to-market partnership the vendor establishes with a service provider. Service providers aren't held to the minimum commitment during the welcome period, but billing begins once a service provider starts using/consuming Cohesity, according to the company.

In addition, Cohesity's program doesn't charge an increased amount for overages if the service provider exceeds its capacity commitment. Kosman said service providers concerned about overages might feel compelled to commit to a higher tier than they would otherwise.

He said Cohesity piloted the pay-per-use pricing model for three quarters with a dozen or so service providers. The company has nearly 100 service provider partners overall. Partners include Expedient, HBR Consulting and QTS Realty Trust in the Americas, as well as Atea, ACP, KDDI, IOmart, Fundaments, M247 and Vanquish Tech in EMEA.

Cohesity, which sells 100% through the channel, said service providers make purchases two out of every three quarters on average. "What is driving and fueling that repeat purchasing is the fact [services providers] are landing more tenants or tenants are expanding," Kosman said. "Pay per use is going to be additional momentum behind that model."

Cohesity refreshes Helios dashboard

Cohesity is also updating its Helios dashboard, which manages Cohesity clusters. The retooled dashboard will let service providers manage global IT resources with higher operational visibility, the company said. "Most service providers we partner with have huge, geographically distributed, multisite deployments," said Ari Paul, Cohesity's manager of product marketing, service provider technologies and apps.

An upcoming Helios update will also let service providers obtain usage stats along with billing and charge-back data across hundreds and thousands of tenants, Paul added.

Other new Cohesity features, meanwhile, simplify disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) setup and failover, according to the company. DRaaS has become an important market for service providers. Other Cohesity data management use cases include archiving, file shares, object stores, test/dev and analytics.

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