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Christophe: Welcome to data protection conversations. My name is Christophe Bertrand. I'm a Senior Analyst here at ESG. I'm joined today by Rodney Foreman, who is the Chief Revenue Officer at Cobalt Iron. Rodney, welcome.

Rodney: Thank you very much for having me.

Christophe: Well, it's a pleasure and, well, you've been in the business for a while and can you catch us up on what Cobalt Iron does, who your customers are, and what's your business about?

Rodney: So, Cobalt Iron is a company that specializes in data protection for customers. We are a SaaS-based data protection solution that addresses mainly the enterprise market. We are venturing more into state, and local, and education, do a lot in health care, and also in finance sector.

But across all industries, we're having some good success because our solution is unique and differentiated in the market because of the automation and intelligence we put into a truly SaaS-based solution that requires no human intervention.

And I think that's what customers are looking for today in the backup and recovery market.

Christophe: Great. So, let's talk about this for a little bit. You mentioned automation and obviously simplicity. Do you see differences across verticals based on the broad spectrum of customers you address?

Rodney: There is a difference in the environments we're supporting, the data types, and the transformation that customers are making today to cloud. A lot of them have digital transformation projects underway and that's why we support the five top major clouds, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google, and IBM. And we can support protecting their data in the cloud or outside of the cloud, remote or on-prem.

We have a very flexible architecture. So, while customers across different industries are dealing with different types of data and in different environments, our solution is flexible enough that we can adapt to those different environments and still provide them a great user experience that is touchless from a administration perspective, we take care of everything.

And we have customers that from the start of the company that have never left. We've never lost a customer.

Christophe: That's great.

Rodney: So, that's a testament to how good our product is.

Christophe: Absolutely. And we were chatting earlier about the role of the channel and channel partners. Can you recap for us, how do you go to market? What is the role of channel partners and what do you foresee moving forward?

Rodney: So, we are 100% channel. Everything we do is through the channel and partners, whether they're a global system integrator or a managed service provider or just a reseller. The partners today have deep-rooted relationships with customers and we understand that.

So, we announced our new channel program, it's called the IronClad Partner Advantage. We call it IronClad because it's about commitment and our commitment is to our partners and to the channel, and we want to make our partners successful. And that's why our program is very unique and differentiated in that we pay a very competitive margin on the front-end when partners close an opportunity.

But we pay even more margin on renewals because we believe it's very important to keep our customers and have a long-term relationship with the customer and support their data protection and their environment as it grows and matures and changes.

We want our partners to stay with us throughout the customer's journey and be very profitable and successful with us.

Christophe: I'm sure you're going to get a lot of people's attention with these statements and with this program. I know that not every vendor has such a generous type of incentives in place.

Rodney: True.

Christophe: Well, thank you very much for joining us today.

Rodney: Thank you.

Christophe: And thank you to our viewers for taking the time.