Data protection…simplified? Hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Cohesity’s CRO, Kit Beall and Veritas’ EVP, Worldwide Field Operations, Brian Hamel to discuss the monumental combination of their enterprise data protection businesses from a sales, customer focus, and integration perspective on this episode of Six Five On The Road.
Tune in to learn why this is big 👇
- Unmatched Scale and Integration: they now offer unparalleled reach across the IT landscape, supporting 800+ data sources, 100+ operating systems, 1,400+ storage targets, and 60+ clouds – all through a single, unified platform
- Modernization Made Easy: Migrating to a modern data protection environment can be complex and costly. The team is committed to simplifying this process with streamlined tools and services, making it virtually “push-button” easy
- Customer-Centric Approach: No customer will be left behind, there will be support for existing environments while providing a clear path to modernize
- Innovation and Long-Term Vision: With increased engineering resources, they’ll continue to drive innovation and solutions to meet evolving customer needs
Learn more at Cohesity and Veritas.
Watch the video below at Six Five Media and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Or listen to the audio here:
Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here at Cohesity Headquarters here in Silicon Valley. It is Deal Day here, the closing of the deal between Cohesity and the Veritas data protection assets. I love Deal Day, Daniel, especially when it’s around a technology or a group of technologies that are so important.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, Pat. Look, this has been going for some time. We know these deals do not happen overnight. There’s so much complexity. First, you got to get the companies to come together. Then you got to get the regulators. You got to get all the sign-off, and of course, there’s all the enthusiasm in the market. There’s those that are excited. There’s those that are saying, “Oh, my gosh, this is good for us.” There’s a lot of that. But Pat, when you get to the Deal Day, everybody from the employees to the customers to the leadership starts to really feel the magnitude of this deal. Being here on deal day, so much enthusiasm, so much energy, really exciting, and obviously, I hope everyone out there is following. Because we have a number of conversations here on The Six Five.
Patrick Moorhead: They are, yeah. We had a conversation with Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity. We’ve talked to the product leaders between the two companies. But there’s been a lot of conversations about customers. That’s where the rubber meets the road. Whether it’s the level of innovation, we had a great conversation with the product leaders and Sanjay on that. The support, whenever you have two companies coming together, there’s always that question, particularly for the customers, is “How am I going to be supported?” So, it is my pleasure to bring in the sales leaders from the two companies, I guess the one company now. Kit and Brian, welcome to The Six Five.
Brian Hamel: Thank you.
Kit Beall: Thank you very much.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Very exciting day. Right?
Brian Hamel: Yeah, big time. I got my first Cohesity pin from Kit this morning. So thank you for that, Kit.
Kit Beall: Welcome to the club.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s great. It looks good on you on that jacket. It’s very nice. But your pin is bigger than his, I mean…
Kit Beall: Well, I had to make sure that he got the branding out there for us, so it works great.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, excellent.
Daniel Newman: And it is terrific because this very episode we have Veritas representation, Cohesity. But now it’s just one big happy family. So Kit, let’s start with you. I mean, look, as the chief revenue officer of Cohesity now in a leadership role. And of course lots of change, lots of excitement, lots of enthusiasm here. What are you so excited about now that this deal has been completed?
Kit Beall: Well, so we’ve been working hard for the last several months, and there’s been a great partnership with Brian and the Veritas team now coming together with Cohesity, one big family. So first of all, super excited for that. But I think what makes me the most personally excited about this is, we’re solving a critical problem for customers around the world, who rely on a combination of Veritas and Cohesity technology to protect and secure their business. So for me, the most exciting thing here is now we can do this at a scale that’s unmatched in the industry. We’re solving a real problem that is frankly top of mind. And as we bring this together here today, I couldn’t be more pleased at the results of this hard work and what we can do to help those customers.
Patrick Moorhead: And Brian, what are your thoughts on it?
Brian Hamel: Yeah, look, I love what Kit just said. It’s been a great journey working together with Kit and the entire Cohesity team. I also love what you said at the very beginning, which is it’s no longer Veritas-Cohesity, it’s Cohesity. We’re all one team now. And to me, as I reflect back on the journey and the opportunity we have, as Kit has talked about our customer base, it’s going to come down to our people. Everyone out there listening today, it’s going to come down to the people, the leadership, the skills. And I think that’s a differentiator. I think bringing together these two organizations is going to be the strength of what we bring to the marketplace.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I think that’s great. So Kit, I’ll start with you here. Sometimes benefits to end customers are evident. And to me as an analyst, hopefully… I mean, I’ve seen, and my team has written about some of the potential benefits. But can you articulate what are the biggest benefits to customers? What does a larger company mean? What does scale mean?
Kit Beall: So I think there are really two categories of benefit to the customers. So the first aspect of this is speed of innovation. We are going to double the size of the engineering team. We’re going to be able to accelerate our product roadmaps, whether that’s on-prem or in the cloud. What we’re doing with security and AI, and a lot of these are buzzwords. A lot of these are, “Oh, we’re doing AI. We’re doing security.” Because you hear a lot about that in the industry, but we are delivering meaningful products that are helping customers every day.
And it’s one of those things where if we can get out there faster with that next feature, support the next thing, be able to help a customer solve an important business problem, that’s an immediate benefit. The other side of this is our reach and scale. We will be able to do business in something like 140 countries around the world, over 140. And again, Cohesity… We were a smaller company in terms of where we had global footprint. Now with Veritas coming together, we have this great reach. It’s not just in terms of sales or whatnot, it’s also support.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Kit Beall: It enhances or follows the support model. When bad things happen, we have more resources to help jump in, help a customer get back on their feet when they need it. So I think the scale and scope of this really benefits our customers in many ways. And I think ultimately down the road positions Cohesity, as Cohesity plus Veritas, as the market leader.
Brian Hamel: Let me just maybe add to that real quick. I love your question on scale and we don’t talk enough about it. And Kit hit a lot of great points. I would just say when you think about our operation now from Sao Paulo to Sydney, Singapore, London, the United States, coming together we now create the scale to be able to do that. And the other point I would just highlight, I love the R&D, the innovation part of the point that Kit made. And if you look at the amount of money that the two companies bring together create for our customers, we’ll simply be able to innovate faster and get to market faster. So I think that’s going to be really exciting for our customers.
Patrick Moorhead: I’m glad you did the double-click on that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, so when you start to think about it, you have built a business that moves at the speed of the global enterprise. And of course with thousands of customers, you are diversified. You work with the smaller, you work with, the larger, you work with the regionals, you work with the globals. But now between the two companies, you’ve got that footprint, you’ve got the capacity and the capability. And look, we all know security data and availability, companies have to run all the time. There is no downtime anymore. That old adage about figuring out how to make money while you sleep. Well, technology has enabled that. We can run our businesses around the clock.
But your innovation, your roadmap, I think you both pointed to it in earlier questions. Brian, I’d like to kind of have you talk about the evolution of the roadmap. I mean, we said this in the beginning. It’s like, look, when these transitions happen, some customers are ecstatic. Other customers are freaking out. And you guys have probably heard from both. And then there’s of course the continuum of everything in between. Do customers have to migrate? Are you guys going to build products to make that simpler? What does the roadmap look like and how do customers know that they can continue forward with their products in a way that’s conducive to their business?
Brian Hamel: Yeah, great question. And Kit and I spend a lot of time with customers. So look, the message that we have been on since day one is “no customer left behind.” I’m sure you’ve heard that from Sanjay as well. But when you talk to customers, it’s really clear to them that when you bring the two companies together, you look at the Cohesity data protection, the Veritas data protection. We’re not going to slow down innovating those two product sets. Those are going to continue to live on for the foreseeable future.
The opportunity we’ll have with a consistent code stream, is to begin to integrate and bring more value those customers set. From a migration perspective, our customers aren’t looking at it so much in terms of having to migrate to one or the other. We’ve committed to them that they’ll both live on. It’s going to be how we bring that together to make it as seamless and give them the options or the choice for the best implementation in terms of their environment.
Kit Beall: So what you just said, Brian, I think is absolutely the foundation here. This gives us a scale in terms of development, resource, and capability. There’s another piece of this as well, which is speed and scale to deliver on cyber resiliency. I think Cohesity is going to be uniquely positioned. In fact, we are today uniquely positioned to deliver on a platform and a capability that has speed and scale that’s unmatched in the market. So when you look at when the bad thing happens. And unfortunately we all know it’s not an “if,” it’s a “when,” sadly.
When you need to get access to that data and restore your environment, the thing that’s going to matter is speed and scale. Can you reboot the firm, whether you’re a bank or hospital or a government agency? These are all so critical as part of our digital lives that having the capability across this broad customer base to get back online as quick as you can. It’s such a unique differentiator for the company. And as we bring these platforms and these products together, we’re going to be able to help even more customers do this at a scale that’s unmatched.
Brian Hamel: Can I just follow up on that real quick? Because I think the point on, I can’t remember if we talked about this earlier, but Cohesity will now be in 85% of the Fortune 100 and approximately 7% of the Global 500. That customer set that Kit’s talking about, speed and scale, that matters, right? That’s critically important to them. We’ve seen that in recent events around the world. So having that opportunity to innovate and drive the speed and scale that we know will be capable, I think customers are excited about that.
Patrick Moorhead: So I really do appreciate the gravity behind “leave no customer behind.” That’s a huge commitment that goes to roadmap. It goes to the way that you’re operating your businesses. But that has to make your customers feel better. I do want to ask you though, what are your customers asking you about moving to a more modern environment?
Kit Beall: But going back to what Brian said, again, the Sanjay mantra, “no customer left behind.” That’s the core, right? If you’ve got something that Veritas has been supporting for the last 15 or 20 years, we’re not going to break that. So that model is still there, but I think your question is, “Okay, why make the jump?” Right? Maybe something-
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, the benefits about moving forward, the value prompt, and the difficulty. Maybe the time frames.
Kit Beall: Well, I think… Let’s start with the why. Right? Why does somebody want to make this? I think there’re really fundamentally two drivers. One is automation, right? Fewer staff. I mean, everyone’s under some cost pressure. There are probably not a lot of college grads coming out saying, “I want to be an AS-400 backup administrator.” I’m just venturing a guess there. So I think that whole notion of being able to automate that, bring it onto a modern platform, be able to get the modern management tools, there’s a huge value in doing that.
The second issue, which is really frankly the macro problem, we’re all facing is security. If you’ve got your data scattered around, you’ve got a bunch of legacy systems, what are you doing? You’re creating more attack vectors for the bad actors, right? Somebody didn’t change the password on that AS-400 backup for the last 10 years. You now have exposure. So as you really think about being able to come forward into a modern, automated platform, now with the state-of-the-art security capabilities, there’s a very compelling reason to make the move if you want to make the move.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Kit Beall: Now, the timeline on that is right now. It starts today. We now have the whole portfolio comes together. We’re going to be able to offer migration capabilities. And of course that’s going to get better and better as we can now bring our teams to work arm in arm, which before today we couldn’t. We had to keep them separate. But now we can actually have them building the tools and the automation capabilities for migrations. It starts today, and it’s only going to get better in the coming months and quarters ahead. So we anticipate being able to roll this out to, frankly, all of the Veritas install base as an option. But there will not be a scenario where we’re going to twist somebody’s arm to do it. We’re going to give them a carrot but not a stick, so to speak.
Brian Hamel: Maybe I just follow up real quick on the, I love what Kit said about the modern customer experience, right? And that’s clearly a core of Cohesity. But today with the addition of Veritas, the workload support that Veritas brings within that install base. Over 800 data sources, over 1400 storage targets, over a hundred operating systems, 60 clouds. One of the strengths that Veritas brings in with that is now being able to support so many different enterprise workloads for our customers. So when you bring together the value of that modern customer experience that Cohesity has created, coupled with the Veritas workload support, customers are excited about the blending of those two things coming together.
Daniel Newman: Great point.
Kit Beall: Yep.
Daniel Newman: All right, so as we kind of pull this together to a close. Us go-to-market folks have to get out there and be out there with the customers, talking and driving sales. And by the way, I bet you those revenue targets didn’t get a smaller in the wake of this deal. But synergy, enthusiasm, let’s go. But in serious for everyone out there. Customers, I think, there’s two groups today that are going to be watching really closely to all the things that get said. I think the employees and your teams. Everyone’s going to be very interested seeing that culture. And I see a lot of real strong synergies there. And the other is going to be the customers wanting to know what is the impact right now? How does this change our business? So Brian, maybe you can take this one and Kit, I’d love to hear from you too.
Kit Beall: Sure.
Daniel Newman: On this Deal Day, as this comes together, what do you think the most significant impact is for your existing customers? And then what should new customers be thinking about?
Brian Hamel: Yeah, I think for our customers, it’s really about our people, right? It’s about all the people coming together now as one team. We are now one Cohesity. There is no more Veritas, there is no more, the previous… It is one new Cohesity here. And I’m really excited about the talent, the skill. We’ve talked about reach and range, the global footprint. So I’m excited about what we bring as a team to our customers.
So what our customers should expect is a new Energize. We ought to be able to create more value for our customers going forward. I think at the end of the day, for me, that will be what we need to be focused on in our first 100 days. How do we integrate so our customers can accomplish the value, see the value that we’re going to bring to the marketplace?
Kit Beall: And building on Brian’s point, it’s about speed, it’s about scale, it’s about innovation, and ultimately about helping solve customer’s problems. And as you say, you’ve been to a lot of these Deal Days. You’ve seen this, I’ve been a part of these. Brian has, too. We’ve seen where these go wrong. And I think this is part of the benefit of having some gray hair, is we’ve done a few of these along the way.
But the reality is we are at the place where we’ve heard very clearly from the customers what they want. We are going to do everything in our power to deliver on best of breed at scale. And do it in a way that customers are smiling and happy and not the other way around. And I think that’s the mission for Brian and myself, is to not only hit those revenue targets, but also to deliver a great customer experience and a great customer outcome.
Daniel Newman: Well, Kit and Brian, I just want to say thank you so much for sitting down here with Patrick and I on Deal Day. We know there’s a lot going on. I’m sure you have big teams and customers that are waiting to hear from you. Your phone’s probably ringing. You probably got a few text messages, WhatsApp signals. Whatever you’re running on, get back to those customers. Keep going, keep growing. And Patrick and I will be here to follow all the work that’s going on with the new, bigger, better, more exciting Cohesity.
Kit Beall: Thank you.
Brian Hamel: Thank you very much.
Patrick Moorhead: You got it. By the way, your excitement is evident, and it’s important in this. So we really appreciate that.
Daniel Newman: Wouldn’t you hope for that from some sales guys? Feels in their rep, new leaders?
Kit Beall: We got to do it.
Brian Hamel: We have a CEO that’s like that as well.
Daniel Newman: Oh, I know. Sanjay’s great.
Patrick Moorhead: Know him well.
Daniel Newman: And obviously everybody out there, hopefully you’ll watch the episode with Sanjay and us as well. And by the way, thanks everyone so much for tuning in here with The Six Five On The Road. We’re here in San Jose at the Cohesity World Headquarters. Hit “subscribe.” Join us for all of the coverage here of Deal Day at Cohesity. We appreciate you being part of our community. We’ll see you all soon.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
