When Cohesity Inc. announced last month that it had received a $250 million investment from SoftBank Corp.’s Vision Fund, the news was noteworthy for two reasons. It was the largest investment in a U.S. enterprise startup in nearly two years, and it was only the second time SoftBank had chosen to invest in the data storage space.

The resulting valuation for Cohesity of over $1 billion placed it in the unicorn category and provided further validation for Cohesity’s model, which consolidates secondary storage silos into a web-scale, hyperconverged data platform across the multicloud environment.

“It’s really having a space efficient, centralized, software-defined platform that is able to service all of the secondary use cases and secondary needs,” said Steve Grewal (pictured), chief technology officer at Cohesity. “We’ve built a platform where you can reduce architectural complexity; you can bring simplicity into the enterprise.”

Grewal spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed the infrastructure challenges facing officials in the federal government and Cohesity’s involvement in working with agencies on information technology initiatives. (* Disclosure below.)

Agencies face IT challenges

As the former deputy chief information officer for the General Services Administration, Grewal is fully aware of the challenges facing government agencies in the implementation of new technologies. Cohesity’s current government customers include the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force.

“The one thing the public sector does really well is capture and collect a lot of data,” Grewal said. “The one thing it hasn’t done well, in my view, is the utilization, the access of that data for decision making and for analysis.”

One of the government’s core technology initiatives involves Centers of Excellence, or CoEs, designed to accelerate modernization of IT infrastructure across agencies. Five centers have already been put in place, according to Grewal.

“They’re using the U.S. Department of Agriculture as kind of a poster child for those Centers of Excellence,” Grewal said. “Cohesity has a value proposition in each of those CoEs.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE