One on One: with Cohesity's Kathryn Ramanathan

Kathryn Ramanathan (Cohesity).

Babysitting during her high school years led Cohesity  Australian and New Zealand channel and distribution manager Kathryn Ramanathan towards building connections and eventually landing her first job with HPE. Ramanathan discusses how seeking out mentors, being vocal and clear about career ambitions has positively impacted her professional progression.

 What was your first job?

My first professional job was at HP (now HPE) where I held the role of sales and marketing associate supporting the partner business managers and channel team. This role was certainly a springboard for my career. While I found myself not completely enjoying the role, I was surrounded by incredibly successful people in external facing roles, who had a consultative and relationship focused approach when selling. It was this environment that excited me and broadened my career aspirations in the IT industry.

How did you get started in the IT industry and progress to where you are today?

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When I was in high school, I put up a sign at my dad’s work offering babysitting services and soon began babysitting for my dad’s colleagues. This part-time job allowed me to build connections with various people throughout the IT industry and it was through this network that I became aware of the sales and associate marketing role at HP.

By starting my IT industry career within a partner organisation, I was able to build my network beyond my required job responsibilities. I have always been vocal about what I wanted to achieve and my career progression, which coupled with having clear leaders and mentors, has allowed me to be open about my ambitions and actively seek out mentorship. By taking responsibility for gaining the right capabilities at the right time, whether experience or skill set, I’ve been able to positively impact my career progression.

Following my time at HP, I spent time at NTT, Brocade and Hitachi Vantara. At Hitachi I held the role of partner manager for Australia and New Zealand. 

My experiences at all these companies afforded me the opportunity to gain extensive experience across the multitude of vendors, the chance to achieve impactful outcomes with a variety of stakeholders and insights into the nature of the IT industry. 

These experiences are what led me to Cohesity, with my current role having a lot of synergy with the role I had at Brocade as an alliance manager. There are certainly differences, with my role at Brocade focused on nurturing legacy product opportunities and creating new revenue opportunities with our OEMs, versus my role at Cohesity which is focused on building and managing the channel ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand. Regardless of the roles I have held, I truly enjoy the full gamut of channel interactions and engagement - there’s certainly never a dull moment.

What are some of your plans for the company in the coming months?

Since entering the Australia and New Zealand market in 2018, Cohesity has continued to grow and we are now at a point where we have our strongest market proposition. We have a highly capable enterprise sales team and an expanding commercial sales team. This growth and team expansion has us poised to continue growing our customer base month-on-month and we are more strategic with our ecosystem, which is crucial to driving our hybrid offering market play of channel, partners and software-as-a-service (SaaS). 

Cohesity continues to develop our commercial offerings and increase our points of engagement, while strengthening our ecosystem and channel engagement, which we know is fundamental to our success as a completely channel-based business.

Our channel focus in Australia and New Zealand is winning together with our partners by delivering a best of breed solution. All our partners are partners by design, as we base our partner approach on ‘quality over quantity’ whereby we recognise that before we can add value to a customer, we must add value to our partners. 

This approach means that our partners can truly scale and grow by doing business with Cohesity, which is vital given our partners are often introducing Cohesity to the customers first. 

Therefore, it’s crucial that we have trust, agreed outcomes and multiple lines of connection or activity, which translates directly to customer outcomes. We are excited about the future with our current partners, the opportunities new local partners offer in the service provider space, along with building our data management-as-a-service (DMaaS) business, with a clear objective of providing customers with a seamless hybrid data management offering.

What are some of your biggest ambitions - personally and professionally?

At a professional level, I am incredibly motivated to continue developing my skills and experience, to ultimately land an executive or managing director role. I’m a strong believer that long term success is ultimately shaped by what you do with your short-term goals. I am always interested in improving myself whether it’s work related or at a personal level, where I love to read a wide variety of books, cook and entertain. It’s all about having a healthy balance.

What has been the best piece of advice you've ever received?

The best advice that I have ever received is: "focus your energy on the task at hand and do not waste time thinking about what you might be missing out on. We are where we are meant to be at this point in time, so make it count for the future."

We are all managing so much in our professional and personal lives, especially through this pandemic, and this only stands to shape our resilience and capability.