Sanjay Poonen, Former COO, VMware
Scott Mill | CNBC
Cohesity, a startup that sells software to back up corporate data, announced Tuesday that it has hired former VMware operations manager Sanjay Poonen as its next CEO as the company challenges incumbents like Dell and heads towards an eventual IPO.
Poonen told CNBC that he received a call from Cohesity founder Mohit Aron telling him he was planning to step down as CEO after leading the company for nine years, but that he wanted to stay on to work on technology and… engineering to work. Poonen has been largely on the sidelines since leaving VMware in 2021 after an eight-year tenure.
He comes to Cohesity at a time when the demand for modern backup systems is escalating as organizations face exponential growth in the size and complexity of their data. It’s also a challenging time as the economy approaches a potential recession and many companies are cutting spending. Cohesity, which was valued at $2.5 billion in a 2020 funding round, confidentially filed for an IPO late last year when the tech market was in turmoil.
Sentiment has changed dramatically in 2022, and the market sell-off has resulted in much lower multiples for private and public software makers.
“As the incoming CEO, you don’t want to be in a frothy situation,” Poonen said. “It’s a great time to join as there are only benefits for the future.”
He said there was no specific timeline for a stock sale for the company, which has more than 2,100 employees.
“Nobody knows the time,” he said. “We’re watching it closely. Everyone is in the same boat evaluating what the right time is.”
The main incumbents in the Cohesity market are Dell, IBM and Veritas. But there are also a number of emerging companies built for the cloud age. In addition to Cohesity, this group also includes Druva and Rubrik.
Poonen said he would like cloud partners like Amazon Web Services to direct their salespeople to adopt Cohesity in more organizations. If customers want to back up data from Microsoft, SAP, or Salesforce software to clouds other than Amazon, they can do so with Cohesity, Poonen said.
“The profile of this company wasn’t at the highest level of the media because they didn’t know much about it,” Poonen said. “Just being here brings a lot more exposure to this company.”
Cohesity has attracted big-name investors like Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Sequoia Capital. When Amazon bought a stake in Cohesity last year, the approval came from Andy Jassy, who succeeded Jeff Bezos as CEO of the e-commerce and cloud giant in July 2021, according to Poonen.
During Poonen’s tenure at VMware, he spoke at the virtualization software maker’s annual conferences and led sales, marketing and other functions. He said he wants to attract customers by prioritizing customer success and building relationships with cloud providers and other partners, rather than just inflating the company’s marketing budget.
CLOCK: Businesses should plan to head further south and prepare for the worst, says Sanjay Poonen
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