Life is getting easier for those cloud service providers in competition with hyperscalers. While Amazon Web Services Inc. runs enough machines in their data centers to heat homes, smaller companies may still make do with less bulk. Technology companies are delivering subscription-based software offerings on which they can easily build.

“We have our own division within Cohesity just for the service-provider market,” said Rawlinson Rivera (pictured, left), chief technology officer of Cohesity Inc. “We’re enabling them to provide their customers with the value that we give our enterprise customers already,” he said. 

These services can have a flywheel effect; service providers can use them to do what they do better. And they can also bake them into the offerings they sell their customers. “We’re just in the background. It’s their business — they’re the ones who are … making a service for their customers based on what they need,” Rivera said. 

Rivera and Brock Mowry (pictured, right), chief technologist at Whoa Networks Inc., spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed how Whoa builds services on top of those it consumes from Cohesity (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Helping providers help themselves and their customers

In addition to backup, Cohesity now offers CyberScan — a vulnerability-scanning service. It allows service providers to scan their environments for vulnerabilities and exposures using backup data. They can also scan the environments of their customers, handily adding a valuable service to their existing cloud offerings.

Whoa bills itself as a cyber-secure cloud platform. It has integrated threat detection and network defense into its infrastructure offerings. It caters to healthcare companies and others particularly concerned about data security and data protection.

“Our focus on compliance [is] really one of the major differentiators from … the hyperscalers,” Mowry said.

The company chose Cohesity backup and data-protection software because it easily extends to its customers. “Being a service provider, I don’t just backup VMs within my environment; I backup VMs in customers’ environments as well,” Mowry said.

“CyberScan … is something that we’re definitely foaming at the mouth to get at. It’s something that we’re ready to put into play because it’s a value-add back to our customers, and having their product in that position gives us an advantage,” he added. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cohesity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE