Cohesity and Veritas' data protection unit, best known for its NetBackup software, will merge to form a company with $1.6 billion in annual revenue.
The companies said in a statement that the combined entity will be able to scale better, serve an installed base of more than 10,000 customers and focus research and development on cloud, security and artificial intelligence.
Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen will be CEO and Greg Hughes, CEO of Veritas, will be a board member and advisor to Poonen. Cohesity is backed by Softbank and Veritas is owned by the Carlyle Group, which bought Veritas from Symantec for $7.4 billion in 2016.
As for the products, Poonen said Cohesity will be committed to Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup appliances and Alta data protection. "Cohesity’s scale-out architecture ideally suited for modern workloads and strong Generative AI and security capabilities and Veritas’ broad workload support and significant global footprint, particularly in the Global 500 and large public sector agencies," said Poonen.
Constellation Research cybersecurity analyst Chirag Mehta said:
"In today's threat landscape, AI-driven attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making data protection in hybrid environments more critical than ever before. Data security and data-resiliency are critical components of cyber-resilience. By combining forces with Veritas, Cohesity will be better positioned to help their customers in their cybersecurity journey."
AI is transforming the security industry and next-gen security companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Crowdstrike and ZScaler are grabbing wallet share and market cap. Cohesity primarily competes with Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup, Zerto and a host of others.
Although the companies didn't share roadmaps, the product lines appear to be complementary. Here's the Veritas NetBackup platform.
Cohesity has one platform and user interface combining Cohesity DataProtect, FortKnox, DataHawk, SmartFiles and SiteContinuity. The Cohesity platform, which runs across the big three cloud providers, is designed to thwart ransomware and recover from attacks, product documents, offer disaster recovery and provide data protection to a wide range of enterprise applications.
