California-based data management company Cohesity has appointed Sanjay Poonen as its new chief executive officer (CEO) and president. He will also be joining the company’s Board of Directors.
In his previous role as chief operations officer (COO) at VMware, Poonen helped double the company’s revenue from US$6 billion to US$12 billion and coordinated key partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Oracle. In addition, he led the company’s security and end-user computing businesses and spearheaded the acquisition of AirWatch and Carbon Black. As the president of SAP, Poonen oversaw SAP’s Applications, Industries and Platforms, and helped double revenue from US$10 billion to US$20 billion.
For Mohit Aron, the former CEO and now founder and chief technology and product officer of Cohesity, the appointment of Poonen, with his experience at VMware, is an opportunity to transform the data management industry, “offering new value in security, simplicity, scale, efficiency, and much more.”
In taking on this new role, Poonen said he finds value in Cohesity’s team for its “strong engineering-centric and consumer success reputation” as well as in the role the company plays in being one of the big players in data management, with its innovative technology, 3000+ customers and key partners such as Amazon, AWS and Cisco.
“To top it all, this is a company whose value proposition I can easily explain to my mom and kids!” said Poonen.