Analyst(s): Krista Case
Publication Date: December 11, 2024
Cohesity has closed its acquisition of the Veritas NetBackup and Alta data protection assets. The combined entity will target shoring up its entrenchment in the world’s largest data storage and protection environments, as well as expanding AI and security capabilities.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Cohesity closes its acquisition of Veritas’s data protection business and sheds light on its planned go-to-market and portfolio strategy.
- Cohesity’s plans to solidify its foothold as the data resilience provider for the world’s largest organizations.
- Cohesity’s go-forward plan for expanding its capabilities in AI, security, and multi-cloud data protection.
The News: Cohesity has closed its acquisition of the data protection assets of Veritas. Prior to the close of the acquisition, the company held an exclusive analyst session led by Sanjay Poonen, CEO, and Vasu Murthy, the company’s newly-appointed SVP and Chief Product Officer. During this session, Poonen and Murthy unpacked the combined entity’s planned portfolio and go-to-market roadmap.
Cohesity and Veritas AI-Driven Cyber-Resilience for the World’s Largest Data Environments
Analyst Take: With the addition of the Veritas NetBackup and Alta businesses, Cohesity will immediately expand its presence in accounts that count the world’s largest protection data stores. It will also complement its core strengths in a way that augments its existing cyber-resilience capabilities in security and AI and expands its workload coverage.
Capitalizing on the Large Enterprise
The point about enterprise traction is important. As noted by Futurum in our initial coverage of the deal, Cohesity will gain immediate access to Veritas’s longstanding traction and strong reputation in enterprise workloads, including its sales presence and global support network.
In the analyst pre-brief, Poonen noted that the combined company has traction in approximately 85% of the Fortune 100 organizations, and approximately 70% of the Global 500 companies. What is especially notable here is the size of these organizations’ protection data stored. Poonen noted that, with the addition of Vertias, Cohesity now protects hundreds of exabytes of data. As he noted, while the midmarket is where the company will grow its number of customer accounts, its net revenue growth will be in the Large Enterprise. This will include building from its traction in:
- All ten of the world’s ten largest financial institutions
- All ten of the world’s ten largest global manufacturers
- Eight of the world’s ten largest healthcare providers
- Eight of the world’s ten largest retail providers.
Integrating the Cohesity and Veritas Technologies
It is important to note that Cohesity brings its own impressive customer base to bear. In fact, its hallmark capabilities of scalability and rapid Instant Mass Recovery have afforded it traction in a host of very large and sensitive environments with stringent availability requirements.
Looking ahead, Murthy will lead the combined entities’ portfolio development. He and Poonen articulated to analysts a clear direction. Both DataProtect and NetBackup will continue to be offered and supported. Customers will not be forced to transition, though transitions will be supported as desired. Notably, within six months, Cohesity Helios will be updated to support both platforms as the common and unified management framework.
Other notable components include the utilization of Veritas Alta for backup-as-a-service, as well as the overlay of Cohesity security and insight/analytics services, including DataHawk and Clean Room recovery across the combined portfolio.
AI-Driven Intelligence
Cohesity’s AI strategy largely falls under the umbrella of Gaia, its generative AI platform for data management, protection, governance, and insights. The approach is twofold.
First, through Gaia, it uses a patented technology for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to apply A to the vast amounts of secondary data under Cohesity management. As Poonen commented, the intention is to unlock value from stored data, for instance tapping it for operational or log insights, as opposed to letting it sit idle in a metaphorical bunker. Futurum notes that this initiative is boosted by NVIDIA’s investment in and collaboration with Cohesity, including the AI chip juggernaut’s participation in Cohesity’s $150 million Series F funding round in April 2024, as well as the two companies’ collaboration to integrate NVIDIA AI Enterprise with Cohesity Gaia.
If this first application of AI is in the realm of a chatbot assistant, Cohesity’s second key application of AI is to sift through backup data and logs for anomalous, potentially malicious activity, and then create actionable summaries and insights for administrators.
Security Safeguards
Poonen painted the picture that if AI is the metaphorical “gas pedal” that modern businesses will use to innovate and move faster, security is its necessary “break pedal.”
As Poonen himself pointed out, his background prior to Cohesity is in fact not in data management and file systems, but rather in security and analytics, for instance, at Informatica, Symantec, and SAP. This background is proving as Cohesity navigates the data protection market shift to cyber-resilience. The company has been steadily building security capabilities such as encryption and user authentication and authorization into its core platform. Per Poonen, these capabilities will continue to steadily be complemented by more advanced add-on capabilities such as cyber vaulting and the previously mentioned anomaly detection.
From the latter perspective, strategic partnerships will also play a role via Cohesity’s Data Security Alliance. For example, Cohesity’s data scanning and classification can be used to inform the threat feeds of partners such as Palo Alto Networks, as a result, helping to uncover cyber-attacks such as ransomware or data extortion.
Emphasis on Multi-Cloud
Facilitating data protection for every workload, regardless of where it is running, is the third key component driving Cohesity’s technology development strategy. This means the ability to support all private cloud environments and hypervisors, including VMware, Red Hat, and Nutanix, the major hyperscalers providing infrastructure-as-a-service, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, and a growing roster of software-as-a-service applications, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
Futurum notes that the combined Cohesity and Veritas entity has the most work to do in the SaaS realm. Veritas brings a rich set of API-based, cloud-native, and third-party connectors that will be valuable in this realm. This is especially true given the fact that each SaaS application utilizes a different API for data transfer, and the fact that there are over 100 SaaS applications in use by the average enterprise. Poonen noted that Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace email will be the priority, in response to demand from SLED (state, local, and education agencies) organizations as well as to Microsoft’s introduction of its Microsoft 365 Backup Storage API.
What to Watch:
- The new Cohesity-Veritas team’s ability to execute on the product vision – notably in the near term, the Helios centralized management platform.
- Customer reception to transition support initiatives, including pricing lock-in and the ability to try specific capabilities for free.
- Ongoing customer adoption and use cases of AI capabilities.
- Integration of the joint ecosystem of cloud service provider, VAR, and SI partners and OEMs and security partners on the technology side.
- Competitors’ response, especially in the area of cyber-resilience for large enterprises and critical infrastructure.
See the complete press release on Cohesity’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Cohesity Completes Series F Funding with IBM and NVIDIA as Investors
Cohesity Acquires Veritas Data Protection Assets
One-on-One with Sanjay Poonen at AWS re:Invent – Six Five On The Road
Author Information
With a focus on data security, protection, and management, Krista has a particular focus on how these strategies play out in multi-cloud environments. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
