In today’s ever-changing world, new technologies can present opportunities but also hard work for companies that need to adapt to a new way of operating. Facing customer inertia to try new tech solutions is a challenge for business software maker Cohesity Inc., according to Chris Wiborg (pictured), vice president of product marketing at Cohesity.

“Oftentimes our number one competitor is the ‘do nothing option.’ It is: ‘I’ve done this forever this way, why change?’” Wiborg said. “But what we find is that the disruption we bring to the market creates an opportunity to look at how you do things differently.”

Wiborg spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Cohesity’s approach to grow in the market and the trends for data management service. (* Disclosure below.)

The balance between risk and reward

Offering new solutions to enterprises always requires a risk-reward balance, according to Wiborg. “Whenever you introduce something new to the market, a new concept, you feel the pain as an organization because you have to educate people about there is a better way,” he said.  “And we are at that stage as a company.”

A successful strategy depends on the power to articulate the benefits of the products to the company and its own IT operators. “It’s not just about saving money,” Wiborg explained. “It’s giving a better way to do it and ideally taking the complexity out of the puzzle you’re managing today and making it easier, simplifying it.”

To position the tech solution, it is therefore necessary to talk to several different people within an enterprise. It means understanding these different groups, their needs, and what they are looking for, Wiborg pointed out.

“If you’re going to cross that chasm, you need to understand that whole life cycle and what the things you can grab onto that draw their attention into these solutions you provide,” said Wiborg, who joined Cohesity months ago. “We are going through an exercise right now to refresh those personas and be able to arm our field and our partners to have those conversations.”

An inspiration for Cohesity is the way that Google handles consumer data. The company is taking the same mindset toward dealing with enterprise data, according to Wiborg. “If Google does a great job with data in the consumer world for the things they own and operate, organizations don’t have that luxury of having Google come in and crawl and manage and index all their data,” he stated. “We can help do that.”

The goal is to provide more than backup and recovery services, which traditionally are seen by IT operators as an insurance policy if something goes wrong. “The thing is how you can put analytics on top of it to get more out of it; how you can get better insights out of it?” Wiborg concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite 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