Cohesity wants a piece of the service provider market. And to that end, it developed a multi-tenant platform with other service-provider specific capabilities. The software-defined platform runs on top of Cohesity, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), or Dell EMC hyperconverged secondary storage appliances.

The purpose-built platform is part of Cohesity’s newly expanded partner program, also announced today.

“We’re announcing the largest investment that we’ve ever made in this segment of our business,” said Todd Palmer, vice president of worldwide channels at Cohesity. “We probably quadrupled what we were investing before — not only in dollars and benefits, but also in people, tools, and resources that we provide.”

In addition to allowing service providers to host multiple customers at scale, the Cohesity DataPlatform gives tenant self-service capabilities such as bring your own encryption key. It includes other security features like secure namespace isolation and per-tenant encryption of data at-rest and in-flight. And it offers advanced inline, variable length, cross tenant, and block level global deduplication using the Cohesity SpanFS system. This improves storage efficiency and fast data access from anywhere.

Service providers can offer their own cloud and managed services — such as backup, archive, disaster recovery [DR], filer, object storage, test/dev, and analytics — on top of the platform and provide their customers with a consistent experience across Cohesity-supported public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

“You have to have multiple tenants on the same architecture, and you have to be able to provide security and isolate those tenants,” said David Kosman, who heads Cohesity’s service providers business. “And with Cohesity they can standardize all of their various services, like a backup service or DR, on top of one, singular Cohesity platform.”

Additionally, Cohesity now integrates with management software including VMware vCloud Director, VMware vRealize Suite, and ServiceNow. “In many areas service providers are heavy users of VMware, so we wanted to make sure we had that integration,” Kosman said.

The platform’s open API architecture allows providers to integrate their own management system as well. And providers can combine DataPlatform with Helios, Cohesity’s software-as-a-service-based management tool.

It offers consumption-based pricing as well as a utility-based model with pay per use.

And finally, the company also today launched the Cohesity Powered trust mark for partners that build their business on Cohesity’s platform and meet quality standards.

Data center provider QTS, channel-only service provider Faction, and Dutch provider Fundaments are the first partners to earn the Cohesity Powered designation. QTS deployed Cohesity in more than a dozen U.S. data centers and offers a Cohesity-powered management backup service. “And they continue to work with us on developing more services,” Kosman said.

IDC analyst Andrew Smith says Cohesity’s competitors in the data management and secondary storage market like Rubrik, Veeam, and Zerto are also targeting service providers. “Some software providers have been better at enabling service providers,” he said. “A lot of what Cohesity is focusing on is easing that path and accelerating their services to market. Cohesity put in the time and effort to come up with the platform and easy integration of pricing and APIs and a dashboard and it elevates their brand because of ease of use.”

The secondary-storage market is still a “proving ground” for vendors, Smith said, adding that “I’m not sure I’d say one vendor is far and away the best.”

What’s unique about Cohesity is that it “covers the entire landscape, from DR to backup to archiving use cases,” he added. “And with Helios, they are focused on some management capabilities that we haven’t seen other providers in the space focused on. It’s about not only providing the function (archive, backup, and DR) but also visibility into your secondary storage so you can generate insights from it and do proactive maintenance and proactive support. We see that as a valuable part of the market that’s still untapped and I think that’s going to continue to be a point of differentiation for them.”