SoftBank-backed data management firm Cohesity expands Pune R&D centre

SoftBank-backed data management solutions firm Cohesity has announced the expansion of its technology centre in Pune. The company, which opened a new office in the city, said that it plans to hire another 100 employees in India, more than doubling its current strength, the company said in a statement.

The San Jose-headquartered firm’s 16,500 square feet facility will help customers focused on backing up, managing, protecting, storing and analysing their data. Cohesity has around 1,200 employees globally, most of whom are at its headquarters. Many of the roles will focus on software engineering and product management, and will span all levels from entry-level to the director, the company added.

Founded by Indian-origin entrepreneur Mohit Aron in 2013, Cohesity's software-defined data management solutions has customers in over 30 countries. Cohesity has so far raised $410 million from investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund, Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Aron is also a co-founder of datacentre player Nutanix, another unicorn startup by Indian-origin founders, which went for an initial public offering in 2016.

“The decision to expand our product development operations in Pune was a logical step with its outstanding talent pool. We are seeing record-breaking demand for our disruptive data management software and our Indian team will be instrumental in helping us continue to drive innovation,” co-founder Aron said.

According to Cohesity, the company's solutions help its customers to address the challenge of data fragmentation as well as make use of the vast amount of enterprise data.

The vast majority of enterprise data is held in the form of backups, archives, file shares, object stores, and data used for development and testing, and analytics. This data is found in silos stored in various kinds of infrastructure like an on-premise data centre or cloud, making it hard to protect, expensive to manage, and difficult to analyse. This is where Cohesity's solutions help companies to make sense of the data and create value through analytics. 

Cohesity consolidates these silos onto one web-scale platform, spanning on-premises, cloud, and the edge computing servers, helping enterprises to run apps on that platform, thus helping them to back up and extract insights from data.

Last year, Cohesity had bought California-based Imanis Data, a provider of data management and backup for Hadoop and NoSQL workloads and databases, for an undisclosed sum. 

The new data privacy rules across the world have also helped Cohesity to expand its business as companies need help to track personal data and determine whether that data is being stored properly and is at risk of being moved or stolen.