Zac Backlin Head of B’ss Dev’t and Strategic Alliances, Cohesity

Cohesity, Inc., in hyperconverged secondary storage, announced the appointment of two former NetApp and EMC executives.

Zac Backlin joins the company to serve as head of business development and strategic alliances.

Patrick Rogers has been appointed head of marketing and product management.

In their new roles, they will contribute to driving product and business strategy, expanding market awareness, and building key go-to-market relationships.

“Both Zac and Patrick bring deep expertise and impressive credentials to Cohesity,” said Mohit Aron, CEO and founder, Cohesity. “With the addition of these key team members, we will continue to double down on partner and go-to-market strategies to meet growing demand for hyperconverged secondary storage solutions that rationalize an organization’s overall storage footprint and result in significant cost savings for IT departments.”

Before joining Cohesity, Zac Backlin was GM at Atos where he was responsible for all cloud business in the Americas and led the successful acquisition integrations of the cloud businesses of Xerox Business Services and Canopy (a joint venture of EMC, VMware, and Atos). Prior to this position, he was SVP, head of Americas at Canopy Cloud Computing, where he was responsible for the Americas P&L and all job functions. In this position, he helped grow the Canopy joint venture from a pre-revenue start-up in 2013 to nearly $1 billion in cloud managed service bookings in 2015, before Atos acquired the company from EMC and VMware. Before Canopy, he worked for nearly 20 years at EMC and at a division of Citigroup, where he held several leadership roles in sales, business development, alliances, investment banking, private equity, and venture capital.

“Cohesity is redefining secondary storage with its converged, unified platform that addresses the unique challenges created by exponential data growth and data siloes,” said Backlin. “I am excited to join a company that is positioned to help enterprise customers improve their IT environments at a lower cost, and developing strategic partnerships to increase adoption of Cohesity’s technology.”

Patrick Rogers is a senior business executive with over 20 years of experience in outbound marketing, strategic alliances, and product management. He comes to Cohesity from Ayasdi, a start-up machine intelligence and analytics company where he served as CMO. Prior to this role, he spent a decade at NetApp leading marketing, strategy alliances, and solutions development teams. During his 11-year tenure, NetApp grew from a file services appliance leader into a worldwide storage powerhouse. Prior to NetApp, he held marketing and product management leadership positions in the Hewlett-Packard enterprise server business. He holds a BSEE/MSEE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

“Cohesity is pioneering a new vision for the hyperconverged, web-scale data center with a focus on secondary storage,” added Rogers. “I’m thrilled to join the company at an important inflection point as enterprises redefine their storage architectures to meet the needs of the 21st century while also cutting costs.”