In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders, Sanjay Poonen, chief executive officer of Cohesity, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how Cohesity is positioning its massive data-resilience platform at the center of the emerging agent economy. Poonen explains how the completed Veritas acquisition vaulted Cohesity from seventh to first in market share, with 70% of the Fortune 500 now relying on the platform to protect over 200 exabytes of data. He details a new strategic integration with ServiceNow's Agent Control Tower, where Cohesity serves as the zero-trust recovery layer — restoring data to any prior point in time when an autonomous agent causes unintended changes.
The conversation also explores Cohesity's deepening co-innovation with NVIDIA, which invested exclusively in the company to help build Gaia, a RAG-based semantic layer that transforms backed-up unstructured data into a searchable, AI-ready resource. Poonen outlines how a new Gaia catalog will feed historical data into platforms such as Databricks and Palantir, opening backup archives to generative AI applications for the first time. He frames Cohesity's trajectory as a three-act story — from foundational data protection, to a five-step cyber-resilience framework embraced by CISOs at major banks and healthcare firms, to an AI and agent-resilience chapter now reaching hundreds of customers. From sovereign cloud requirements driving on-premises AI deployments in Europe to the revenue potential of telco-operated AI platforms, Poonen provides a roadmap for how Cohesity plans to turn the world's largest pool of secondary data into a strategic asset for the AI era.
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Sanjay Poonen, Cohesity
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders, Sanjay Poonen, chief executive officer of Cohesity, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how Cohesity is positioning its massive data-resilience platform at the center of the emerging agent economy. Poonen explains how the completed Veritas acquisition vaulted Cohesity from seventh to first in market share, with 70% of the Fortune 500 now relying on the platform to protect over 200 exabytes of data. He details a new strategic integration with ServiceNow's Agent Control Tower, where Cohesity serves as the zero-trust recovery layer — restoring data to any prior point in time when an autonomous agent causes unintended changes.
The conversation also explores Cohesity's deepening co-innovation with NVIDIA, which invested exclusively in the company to help build Gaia, a RAG-based semantic layer that transforms backed-up unstructured data into a searchable, AI-ready resource. Poonen outlines how a new Gaia catalog will feed historical data into platforms such as Databricks and Palantir, opening backup archives to generative AI applications for the first time. He frames Cohesity's trajectory as a three-act story — from foundational data protection, to a five-step cyber-resilience framework embraced by CISOs at major banks and healthcare firms, to an AI and agent-resilience chapter now reaching hundreds of customers. From sovereign cloud requirements driving on-premises AI deployments in Europe to the revenue potential of telco-operated AI platforms, Poonen provides a roadmap for how Cohesity plans to turn the world's largest pool of secondary data into a strategic asset for the AI era.
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders, Sanjay Poonen, chief executive officer of Cohesity, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how Cohesity is positioning its massive data-resilience platform at the center of the emerging agent economy. Poonen explains how the completed Veritas acquisition vaulted Cohesity from seventh to first in market share, with 70% of the Fortune 500 now relying on the platform to protect over 200 exabytes of data. He details a new strategic integration with ServiceNow's Agent Control Tower, where Cohesi...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
How has Cohesity performed over the past year since the Veritas acquisition, and what recent events and strategic announcements have you made?add
How does the issue of observability and explainability for AI agents relate to the Cohesity–ServiceNow partnership, and what role does Cohesity play in protecting, securing, and scaling agent infrastructure?add
How did the partnership between NVIDIA and Cohesity develop, and why did NVIDIA decide to invest in and support Cohesity’s RAG-based backup application?add
Can this RAG application be built to run on CPUs, and can you provide performance data showing before-and-after results?add
How would you describe the company's evolution and its current product strategy—specifically the "three-act" story—and the cyber resilience/security capabilities you now offer?add
How are you adapting to sovereign cloud and data residency requirements when customers demand their data remain within a specific country?add
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE here in our New York Stock Exchange studio. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our East Coast studio, overlooking the show floor. Part of our new brand, the NYSE Wired program, it's a CUBE Original, plus the open source community of leaders are part of that, curated by Brian Baumann at the NYSE. We got a CUBE alumni going back to the origination of theCUBE, 17 years. Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity. Sanjay, great to see you in our new set. What do you think? Not too shabby?
Sanjay Poonen
>> It's amazing. I got to tell you, I knew you when you were small-time in this small little place in SAP, and I may have been your first or second, or third interview. I used to come here to NYC to talk to CNBC. Really, I love this place.
John Furrier
>> Great.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Congratulations on all your success.
John Furrier
>> And how did you describe me to Lynn Martin, the CEO? What did you call me?
Sanjay Poonen
>> I said, "Vellante and John, I was told they are two very interesting characters." I forget exactly what it is. And you are-
John Furrier
>> Jim Cramer. You mentioned a Jim Cramer reference.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah. You are the Cramer of tech, okay? Cramer has a more business perspective on everything.
John Furrier
>> His stock picks are great, legendary. Got a great community.
Sanjay Poonen
>> You've down it well. And you've covered SAP, VMware, AWS, Dell. I've been to many of the events. You and Dave Vellante do a great job.
John Furrier
>> Well, appreciate it. You're a special friend of theCUBE. More importantly, we've been following your career from SAP, of which Bill McDermott's now the CEO, was a co-CEO of SAP, and now he's the CEO of ServiceNow.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Good friend.
John Furrier
>> Very timely to get into that discussion. Progression through VMware where you transformed VMware, set the agenda on their growth strategy.
Sanjay Poonen
>> , yes.
John Furrier
>> And now at Cohesity as the chief executive officer, and now with the combination with Veritas, you told me in theCUBE, better together, one plus one is five. I think it might have been five or three or four-
Sanjay Poonen
>> I said 11.
John Furrier
>> 11? Okay.
Sanjay Poonen
>> One plus one equals one, one, one, one. There you go.
John Furrier
>> So, a lot's going on. The performance is great. Congratulations. You're in New York for an event. You have news. I want to get into the news real quick. Then, I want to get into what you see your strategy is. This is our Cybersecurity Leaders. You had some news with ServiceNow and a variety of other select targeted ecosystem winners. Take us through the news you had today with ServiceNow.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah, John, it's been a great year. It's been about a year since we finished the acquisition of Veritas. It's gone really well. We're making our numbers. We're the number one market share. So, Cohesity's gone from number seven in this space to number one. And really, we're building a rule of 40 type of company. Very strong success in the Fortune 500. 70% of the Fortune 500 are our customers. Extremely strong in banking, public sector, healthcare, telco and technology firms. So, we had a big event here in New York and a little bit like the Rolling Stones tour, we're going from New York, Paris, Singapore, three events, bringing our customers here with hundreds in the room and then thousands and tens of thousands watching on livestream. We think that's the new model of how I think some of these things are going to play out. And we announced some strategic news around the notion of how AI and agents could be used for good and how do we play defense when they're used for bad. Okay, think of it that way. The paradox of both of those. I'll get to the good part in a second. But the agent-resilience story was a key part of what resonated. And we made a strategic announcement at ServiceNow, where what they are building is an Agent Control Tower for a place where you can build, register, manage, secure and observe agents. And that Agent Control Tower, if one of those agents go awry, remember that fat finger delete of a file you had in the past? But this time it's not a human, it's a non-human doing that. They would detect that and they will send us a signal. And we're just basically a platform that's built for zero-trust, immutable. We can then restore the data to the previous point in time because we have all of that data available to you. We announced that with ServiceNow. Bill McDermott and I were quoted. I put out a blog post on LinkedIn and he echoed that to his community. Our people were excited about that. And we also had announcement with Datadog. But that was the first, I've got a few other things, but that was the first major pieces.
John Furrier
>> I want to get into this ServiceNow because they've been doing on a tear lately with agents. Obviously, they have their business platform, been a great business model, been following them as well. Agents are particular. Everyone loves them. They're going wild. They're running wild. The number one conversation is tracing, observability, tracking, and then trust. Is it explainable? So, in the enterprise, these are the two hot buttons that people are talking about. Some say guardrails, but really, it comes down to, can I observe them and manage them, metrics to that? And then, two, are they trusted? Can I explain where it came from to manage around hallucinations? This is a huge factor. How does that relate to the Cohesity-ServiceNow story? And what's your role in that agent, protect, secure, scale?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah. So, we are a data-resilience platform. So, we have 200 exabytes of the world's data. And by the way, that number is significantly bigger by a factor of 5 or 10 than all our competitors put together. So, all of the largest companies store their historic data. Secondary data, backup data is just a time series index in an immutable, secure fashion of everything you have, especially if your retention requirements are forever. So, we're not the platform to build, manage, secure, register, and observe those agents. In fact, some of our competitors built an agent cloud or acquired an agent cloud, we think that's an utter waste of time and money. The companies are going to do that are going to be companies like ServiceNow, like Datadog, like AWS that has AgentCore, like Microsoft that has Agent 365, like Google who have Agent Foundry, CrowdStrike bought a company called Pangea, Palo Alto, they're all focused on some aspect of that agent platform. So, we went to each of them, starting with ServiceNow, because if you think about agents and managing and securing and observing those, it's like a CMDB problem. If you are a CMDB, which is what ServiceNow does, think of agents as just being one more asset that they're tracking. And Bill made it very clear to me, "We intend to be the Agent Control Tower of the enterprise." So, we said, "Listen, that's great. We're going to integrate with you. So, where you see an anomaly because of an agent doing something..." And the beautiful thing about Cohesity, because we were a platform, we could integrate into them with our APIs in a matter of days.
John Furrier
>> I want to just interrupt you for a second because you mentioned CMDB. Explain what that is, some people might not know what the acronym is. It is really the database for the configurations-
Sanjay Poonen
>> There you go.
John Furrier
>> Configuration management database?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Something like that.
John Furrier
>> But basically, it's for all the files that configure the past, the static rules, the rules.
Sanjay Poonen
>> You could think of it like the SAP for IT. It's an ERP system for IT. You store all your configs in your CMDB. This is what Remedy was in the past, remember those old days? ServiceNow has modernized us for the cloud. But when you track your assets and you track your IT workflows, you do that with ServiceNow. ServiceNow's become the SAP of IT sort of thing. So, if you do that same process with financials with SAP, you're doing that with IT with ServiceNow. So, agents are just another IT workload that you're going to track within their platform. The question is, will they build a rich enough platform to register, manage, secure, and observe agents? And they're well on that way with the Agent Control Tower. Now, they won't be the only company, but I think they are a leading company to be that, and that's why we picked them first.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. So, it's kind of like an agentic infrastructure. I was talking about this with another guest earlier on today around how you got agents and AI-native software layers and people using all kinds of code assistants and copilots and all that kind of stuff. But the infrastructure piece feels like cloud-native, but it's mostly AI-like infrastructure where, when you inject intelligence, then you have a generative, as Jensen always used to say, generative, not static rules. So, this notion of a config file, which we've seen security breach, "Oh, I didn't update the patch," or, "The rules were broken." The agents have to respond to the intelligence. So, how does that translate into the cyber resilience? Because you have to, one, protect and restore. And data security is the hottest area and that's what you do. So, as you have more intelligence, what does that do for your customers at Cohesity?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah. So, there's two things. One is when that agent goes awry and it detects data that's been deleted, we can restore and recover any point-in-time data. But there's another aspect of it. That agent infrastructure is kind of like a virtual machine or a container. It has state to it. It has a vector database or other things. We announced, for example, the ability to back up and restore Pinecone, a vector database. We can now restore that entire agent infrastructure, all of that, because it's just another workload that we need to be able to restore fairly well and fast and easily. So, as we think about this, we announced both the ability for data resilience, but also the way in which we can do agent resilience for that agent itself.
John Furrier
>> So, agent resilience is basically cyber resilience, it's data, but they're now workers?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> So, when you talk to customers-
Sanjay Poonen
>> Non-human identities, that's the way to think about them.
John Furrier
>> So, when you talk to customers, what are they saying in terms of the work that they got to do to prepare? We've seen examples. I was just interviewing at Barcelona at MWC, AT&T senior engineer, and he said, "We had 19 miles of open source because the frontier miles couldn't speak telco. They didn't have all the data." And he said when he did the analysis, when they have their agents successful, the grind out of the compliance, the hard work that they do allowed the agents to scale. If they didn't do the work on identity or compliance and governance, they went off the rails.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> What's your view on that and how are you thinking about that with your world because you're protecting all the data?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah. So, there's two things that I talked about here. One is AI and agents done for good, I want to get that in a second. And how do you protect from the bad? And we've discussed all of what you protect in the bad and partnerships like what we're doing with ServiceNow, Datadog and others to come. But on the aspect of how you use this for good, we have, for example, transformed our entire enduring effort inside Cohesity with agents to write code faster. One of the things that in our space is very common is you build connectors to many of these source systems. We have thousands of connectors to virtual machines, databases. We're now using vibe coding techniques to build connectors, and it's being done six times faster. So, that's a productivity improvement, John, to many of the ways in which you build connectors rapidly. We have filed for a patent for how you can use this technology to build connectors. Another thing that we did, and this is where our friend Jensen and NVIDIA comes in, we've been able to say, "Once that data that we are backing and protecting lands on our platform," remember it's a software-defined secure file system, "rather than just thinking of it as a storage problem, let's now transform that data to a lake." So, we built the world's first vector database, a semantic layer to interrogate the data that we back up. So, for example, imagine our customer has hundreds of millions of PDFs and you want to write a query, which is all of those vendor documents, "Show me my summary contract terms I've done with them," or maybe it's healthcare records. Any unstructured data, we back up. All the historical data is there. Search it just like you search with ChatGPT. So one of the other things we announced was that product guy that we built with NVIDIA. Remember NVIDIA invested in that company, Jensen talked about us, the only company he invested in two years ago at GTC. GTC is coming up in a week. We'll have some more announcements with them. What we did was now we said, "We're going to open up that layer of Gaia to not just be our own app, we will allow search tools like Glean and Copilot and Amazon Q, and whatever have you, or ChatGPT, to talk to our semantic layer. But more importantly, we'll allow our catalog, we announced also a Gaia catalog, to talk to Databricks or to Palantir. So, it's opening up that platform now of this data that we have to an ecosystem of data for consumers, and that's going to open up a whole new opportunity for this secondary backup data to participate in gen AI apps.
John Furrier
>> I think the ServiceNow announcement really talks about how their AI platform with your product works better together. It's a good announcement. But you mentioned something about the relationship with Palantir and all these different environments. The AI world, it's not your yesterday's data backup and recovery because you have different modes. You could have this platform... Because you're essentially data security.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yes. You're all clean data, right?
John Furrier
>> It's data security, that's the way I look at it. Maybe it's the wrong category or-
Sanjay Poonen
>> No, it's good.
John Furrier
>> It's not a Magic Quadrant, whatever. But if I'm a customer, I might have a little bit of Palantir. I'm going to have Glean. I'm going to have all these systems and the user journey is multimodal, multi-platform-
Sanjay Poonen
>> We are a source of data to those tools, right? Yes, and you're right. I mean, 20 years ago when we first met, we were talking about business objects, and that was the BI system of SAP. Now, it's Palantir, it's Databricks. We were talking about BW and HANA. Now, it's Databricks and Snowflake. So, yes, the technologies have evolved, but our job is to ensure that if we're protecting the world's data, hundreds of exabytes off it, we feed that data into a Databricks and that's a novel concept. Nobody in our space has built that catalog to be able to feed into these data lakes. And that's why Databricks was actually one of the other announcements we made yesterday. So, I think if you think about the ServiceNow announcement for that agent resilience story and the Databricks announcement for this catalog story, those were the two highlights yesterday were I think that ServiceNow announcement and the Databricks announcement.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. And I think that also the need that we see for horizontal scalability across different use cases and touches. Talk about how that translates to NVIDIA? I know you mentioned NVIDIA, that you're going to have some activity there. We both know Jensen in his speech, he says computer science on stage more than any CEO I know. I mean, you have to work on that, Sanjay. He says it like six times in a keynote. He says computer science, distributed computing. So, clearly, AI factories are pumping out tokens and driving intelligence. Physical AI is a big theme and robotics. That's the two worlds coming together. So, as you look at your enterprise, what is NVIDIA enabling you? More horsepower, supercomputing capabilities? Are you getting leverage out of the performance of, say, the GPUs and the systems? And is there an ecosystem play with things that they've been expanding because they've been really rolling out their ecosystem?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah. Let's back up for just a second and just talk about what an incredible moment we are. I think Jensen is the Steve Jobs of the AI era, the godfather of AI. People went to WWDC and the Apple launch events to watch Steve Jobs. And I think in the cloud world, they went initially in the SaaS world to Benioff and then Andy Jassy, his three-hour lectures were amazing. If you're in the AI world, you must be at GTC because this person gives you a complete, from the hardware all the way to software, a three-hour lecture. I mean, he's a professor at heart, that Jensen. So, it's amazing.
John Furrier
>> And he's completely transparent and authentic.
Sanjay Poonen
>> And authentic.
John Furrier
>> He doesn't have the canned answers.
Sanjay Poonen
>> There are lines of people at the San Jose SAP Center lining up to get to the show. I mean, I'm fortunate to have a VIP seat next week. You'll be there, I'm sure.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Sanjay Poonen
>> So, the way we think about it is when we built this solution, I went to him. I'd known him from my VMware days. I went to Satya and a few other friends and said, "We have a large amount of data. Can we build a ChatGPT-like capability on top of this data?" And he and others opened my eyes to RAG, retrieval augmented generation. I had no idea. John, if you'd asked me what RAG was, I would have told you piece of cloth you wiped your windshield with two years ago.
John Furrier
>> Retrieval augmentation generation.
Sanjay Poonen
>> But now I'm like, "This is so exciting." So, we applied for a patent to be the first company that uses RAG for backup use cases. And Jensen saw this and said, "This is amazing. If you're backing up the world's data and you're building Gaia, I'd like you to build Gaia," this RAG-based application, "on top of my platform," the NVIDIA enterprise AI platform. Now, for me, what's it then for me to do RAG? Well, the enterprise AI platform NVIDIA. Think of NVIDIA as a GPU, CUDA on top of that, like an OS layer, and then this enterprise AI platform. If I build on that platform, I get my app to run on top of AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and on-prem for free because he's building his platform on all of those five environments. So, it was an easy answer. They put money into the company, exclusively one company in this space, us. And we're working very closely with them and every-
John Furrier
>> That's a huge endorsement for NVIDIA to invest Cohesity.
Sanjay Poonen
>> We're a much smaller company than them. They are-
John Furrier
>> They're pretty big. $4 trillion market cap.
Sanjay Poonen
>> We're multi-billion, but not-
John Furrier
>> You're not public yet though, we'll get to that later.
Sanjay Poonen
>> We'll get to that later. But anyway, nonetheless, he has one of his top executives, Kari Briski, check in on us every month and allows us to build our product. And they're constantly asking us, "How are you using our platform? Can you use this library better?" And I find that co-innovation with NVIDIA makes us a better AI company.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, their co-design philosophy... And Kari's, by the way, CUBE alumni as well. She's been on theCUBE multiple times.
Sanjay Poonen
>> She's fantastic.
John Furrier
>> They lean in and they're technical.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Very.
John Furrier
>> They're not just hand-waving. They engage, they are intentional and they co-design.
Sanjay Poonen
>> I mean, many of them are PhDs. So, let's talk about it. They're deep technical people.
John Furrier
>> All right. So, are you going to get any value on the performance side? Because we're seeing NVIDIA also accelerating more performance that used to have... How do I say this? In security specifically, there's always overhead associated with certain things you did in software, but now that we have high-performance-
Sanjay Poonen
>> Stay tuned next week.
John Furrier
>> Okay, you got something-
Sanjay Poonen
>> Jensen is going to be talking about it. And he's asked us for performance date before and after. And one of the things that we would not be able to do is build this RAG application on CPUs, it requires GPUs. So, that's very clear. I mean, it's just a performance difference between traditional CPUs and GPUs. But many of his libraries provide even faster performance before and after. And I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but he is really eager to see that and we're feeding him some of the information we're seeing in performance. Performance is a key factor. Everybody wants something faster. And we are in a really prime position to use their libraries and show him and customers how this particular capability is faster.
John Furrier
>> I mean, you can get so much more value. I almost connect the dots in real time. I don't want to spill them beans a little bit. I mean, you could see things early, the predictive nature of what to prepare, all kinds of cool stuff. Okay, go ahead-
Sanjay Poonen
>> No, I was going to say, it's a little bit like, I don't know, pick your favorite company. If you had a front row seat to work with an iPhone in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, you were incredible, right?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Look at that. So, I just think this is a once-in-a-time era. You want to stay close to the following five or six companies in AI. NVIDIA, one of the public... Probably I'd rank Google first, AWS Azure, and then Anthropic, OpenAI. Those six companies are driving AI and we're very fortunate to work .
John Furrier
>> Google has really turned up the heat. In the past two years, in the past year with Gemini.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Gemini's legit.
John Furrier
>> And they're expanding their CapEx, ramping up to Amazon Web Services levels. They're looking good right now.
Sanjay Poonen
>> So, is Anthropic. So, my view is the platform for all of them will be NVIDIA. Which LLM is going to win? I use all of them, John. I hope you do too, right?
John Furrier
>> Of course. They all give different answers.
Sanjay Poonen
>> You got Gemini. You got ChatGPT-
John Furrier
>> You'll get kind of the same answer and different check... I always check my model, see which one spits out. Remember that book that Jeffrey Moore wrote called Inside the Tornado.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Oh, we are there.
John Furrier
>> It was a must-read book in business school, I remember when I was getting my MBA. It was basically, if you're inside the tornado, you're good. If you're not, you get thrown out. NVIDIA is the tornado. The hyperscalers are in there too. So, you got all this distributed computing hybrid, again, we've talked about that for now almost a decade, full on distributed computing, hybrid cloud. So, everything's a node. AI factories at the edge. I wrote a big report out at MWC of hyperconverged edge, which we think will happen. That's going to happen. So, you're going to have AI factories everywhere. You're going to have all these data-processing plants. Quantum will process materials and RF. So, the world of computing, Sanjay, is changing. So, I have to ask you, what's your vision of, as you guide Cohesity with all the assets, you're partnering with all the key players, you're inside the tornado. What's the strategy? What's the 20-mile stare for Cohesity as you guys probably go public soon?
Sanjay Poonen
>> You mentioned one of those things that we have to watch very closely. What is the unit of compute as we need to do algorithms faster, right? CPUs, GPUs, quantum. So, we're watching very closely. In security, quantum's going to have some enormous impact on encryption algorithms, a variety of things that could help us because we're a security company. We are watching very closely techniques of storage. You moved from tape... Remember this industry moved from tape to disk, to flash, to other forms of QLC? There's a variety of things. And there's other companies doing creative stuff in that area, like VAST is doing some good stuff there. You can learn from all these companies. Then, we watch very closely what's happening at the cloud layer. Do you go containers, virtual machines, containers, serverless? So, I think for me as a computer scientist who started off in the analytics world, that's what I did at SAP in the applications world at SAP to then infrastructure and security at VMware. And now, obviously, in the data security area, it's a fascinating time.
John Furrier
>> So, a lot of the conventional wisdom is like, "Oh, is SaaS-pocalypse going to take away companies?" Clearly, I poo-pooed that. But you bring them back to the Steve Jobs moment is that I interviewed the co-founders of Nest. And we were talking about this SaaS-pocalypse. And they're like, "Well, if you build a better product, doesn't matter who tries to commoditize the software, what's the moat? What's the competitive advantage?" And he said at the time, the big debate inside Apple where he was working with Steve Jobs on was, "When should we launch the iPhone?"
And the debate was, "The iPod's killing it." Was the number one cash cow at that time. And so, they had to cannibalize their own product and brought out, not just an iPod replacement, camera, computer, Apple Store platform. So, the integrated product became a game-changer. Rim had the same opportunity, Blackberry, so did Nokia. They died, Apple won. So, we're in the same mode with AI. So, I have to ask you, as you look at the product, you're in security, data security is the hottest area, AI inference is building out. Does Cohesity have that new thing that transitions the old to the new? And what's your thinking around that, if that's a metaphor?
Sanjay Poonen
>> I think it's the right analogy. I started my first job at Apple. I think if you go back and look at that history of the iPod and when the iPhone came out, circa 2007 or so. He could have launched the iPad before the iPhone, but he stalled the iPad, got the iPhone out, and then launched the iPhone. Remember what he said? "This is a phone, this is a music player, this is an internet navigator all in one." It was a beautiful launch. So, we have a three-act story of what we're doing at the company. The roots of this company is the world's first and best zero-trust platform built immutable to store lots of data. Mohit, the founder, built a supersonic platform, built for security where the speed of recovery is second to none. We've built on that foundation now, that data platform, that's where we have a second act of security now. That started off as mostly a data management and somewhat security pieces, but now we have very sophisticated... Cyber vaulting, threat protection, application recovery, clean room recovery, and now data security posture management. A five-step cyber resilience framework that we pioneered in close concert with our CISOs. That's act two. And we announced a number of those yesterday at our event, great support. By the way, we had JPMorgan, we had Bank of New York, and we had Cencora, the former AmerisourceBergen. Great customers, CISOs and CIOs talking about it. Act three is all about AI and agents, okay? Both playing defense on agents and playing offense with AI on the data pieces of it. I think those three acts are going to provide us a lot of ammunition. We have 13,000 customers. Are of our 13,000 customers are in act one. They're doing a lot with the corporate data protection assets. Thousands are now in act two. Hundreds in Act three, but I'd like to get all of our customers on all three acts.
John Furrier
>> And the progression's going there.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Very well.
John Furrier
>> All right, Sanjay. I want to wrap up by just getting your feedback on the customer event you had in New York. I know it's a roadshow. You got a customer focus in these areas. Are the geographies different? You see sovereign clouds now, sovereign AI. I'm sure international, it's going to be a big discussion. What are you hearing from your customers? What are the burning issues? What's their opportunity? What are some of the drivers for them? What are they thinking about?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah. If you take our customer base now, 13,000, and we have the largest market, the highest market share and the biggest enterprise customers rely on us for resilience. So, you take the banks, whether they're bank of JPMorgan, Bank of New York, Cencora's in the healthcare industry. What they look for us are five Ss, speed, scale, security, smarts and simplicity, okay? And they're constantly giving us feedback. They picked us often for one or two of those three of those Ss and how we make those five Ss better. And you're constantly asking... We added probably hundreds of features for one particular bank because I knew that if I get that bank right, the other banks are going to be smaller use cases of that big bank, and that's how we roll. And we do the same thing-
John Furrier
>> That's really about scalability.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Totally, right? We have a very simple principle how we run the company. Innovate the best product, think iPhone, think Apple, and then be obsessed with the customer. Whoever your best customer obsession example, it may not even be a tech. Nordstrom's a good customer obsession example. They're obsessed about the customer. You build a great product and you're obsessed with a customer, you build a great company. I think that's how Andy's built AWS.
John Furrier
>> Are you hearing from them that there are certain things that are blockers? Is it market timing?
Sanjay Poonen
>> Yeah, let's talk about one of the things you brought up, which is sovereign cloud. I think what's also happening is outside the US, maybe because of tariffs or other company aspects, certain countries are saying, "We need to ensure our data stays in." Pick your favorite country in Europe, Germany, France, Netherlands, Nordics, or Middle East. As a result, everyone's having to adapt to saying, "What does that mean now?" And we partnered very closely with many service providers who are there, maybe like a Swisscom, or a Deutsche Telekom, or an Airtel, or what have you. And the public clouds are also building sovereign clouds and we have to adjust to that because the reality is everyone's not going to... One of our Netherlands customers said, "I want to use Gaia, this AI product, but the data cannot leave the Netherlands." So, we worked with NVIDIA to bring the stack on-prem. So, I think one of the things you have to do, VMware did this well, SAP did this well, is you have to adjust to the locale you're in. And as a global company, we were about an 80% North America business two years ago when it was Cohesity was standalone, number seven in the space. As we came together with the acquisition of Veritas, we're now 50-50. So, our business is very global, very international, and we have to now adjust to those natures of how those customers want to play. And for me, given a lot of my time at SAP was with German companies, I know a lot of how the Europeans think. I'm also on the board of Phillips, so I go to Netherlands fair amount. I think the European companies and many of the Asian companies are going to guide US companies that ask as to how we balance the best for the US and for many of the other big GDPs in the world.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Well, congratulations on the success. I know business is going great. You mentioned some highlights. While I have you here, I want to get your take on the telecom market. MWC was just there. We were there, our fourth straight year with the theCUBE. We published our report, I put out-
Sanjay Poonen
>> We were there too. I sent some of my team there.
John Furrier
>> I put out my hyperconverged at the edge, it was getting massive circulation. And the idea is that AI factories are going to come to the edge. So, intelligence is going to be injected into the telco infrastructure. They got the physical plant. Physical AI is coming to telco. You have a lot of experience in this area. And they have the data, they got the network, they get the customers, they got the footprints, towers, central offices. I mean, a small retrofit, $90 billion retrofit for one carrier, could change the game. What would be your view on their opportunity now? Best ever? Last chance?
Sanjay Poonen
>> They have a chance to innovate. First off, many of the world's telcos, it's one of our top five, maybe our fourth-biggest vertical in industry. So, several of the US telcos protect their data with us, many of them in Europe. In Asia, we have very strong presence in the telco market. So, I think they're also now starting to see the data they collect, whether its call data records or others, could become a pipeline for AI apps. I think the challenge they have because they have so much assets, right? Can they innovate at the pace of these newer companies that don't have assets? Whether it's a media company like a Meta or some of the other ones that are just without assets, but just focus on content. And you've seen some of them shedding content and focused on infrastructure. But I think listen, they are a fabric of-
John Furrier
>> Yeah. AI infrastructure is a great tell sign. Not a lot of CapEx to add to the existing footprints. And sovereign cloud and telco kind of go together.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Especially, as you talked about in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, European telcos and the Asian telcos have an opportunity to really build sovereign clouds. The question is, are they interested in building enterprise data centers, right? Telefónica, you take any of these big ones. If they have the wherewithal, I think they can provide for their country. Usually in every country, there's one or two or three main telcos. I mean, there's only 30 telcos in the world that really matter, and you probably saw that at Mobile World Congress-
John Furrier
>> Yeah, we to most of them. What's interesting is that the telco sovereign cloud conversation about GDPR and data privacy, the AI conversation is more about revenue. And it's not about price per subscriber or per circuit or how much band are we selling? It's what services and can I run an AI platform? That's a revenue in-country. So, a lot of people are talking about, "Hey, let's service our own people and keep the money. Not the data, just the money, too."
Sanjay Poonen
>> I think if you're a dominant telco in each of the top-10, 20 GDPs, you go country by country, you have an opportunity to take advantage of that. Now, the US telcos are probably going to have to compete with the public clouds to do that because in the US, probably put that in there or partner with them, but I think the European, Asian telcos have a tremendous opportunity.
John Furrier
>> Sanjay, great to see you. Thanks for coming into our new studio here at the NYSE.
Sanjay Poonen
>> Fantastic. Thank you.
John Furrier
>> Of course, we have Palo Alto connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. We're covering the tech TV here and technology is the market. The market's changed by technology. Every single vertical, all aspects of our life, physical and digital coming together in all areas. We're doing our part here in theCUBE to bring that to you. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier