Cohesity Snaps Up Veritas’ Data Biz for $7B, Targeting AI-Powered Future. Combined force to protect massive datasets, empower businesses & lead the next era of data security.
Data security and management provider Cohesity announced a definitive agreement to acquire the data protection business of Veritas. The combined company is valued at approximately $7 billion and aims to increase its share of a growing $30 billion market.
Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen will lead the combined company. Greg Hughes, current CEO of Veritas, will serve as a board member and strategic advisor to Sanjay Poonen following the transaction’s closing.
The deal, unanimously approved by both Cohesity’s and Veritas’ boards of directors, is expected to close by the end of 2024, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Cohesity will finance the transaction through a combination of equity and debt.
Cohesity’s current marquee investors, including Softbank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital and Premji Invest, will continue to support the combined entity. Existing Veritas shareholders, including majority owner Carlyle, will become Cohesity shareholders after the transaction’s close.
The remainder of Veritas’ businesses will be structured into a separate entity, dubbed “DataCo.” It will include the InfoScale, data compliance and backup exec businesses and will function autonomously and be led by CEO Lawrence Wong, currently senior VP of strategy and products at Veritas.
Cohesity commits to continued product support
The combined company will continue to invest in and advance all of Cohesity’s products and services, along with Veritas’ NetBackup, NetBackup appliances and Alta data protection offerings, while working toward an integrated solution.
“All products will be supported for many years. Customers can migrate when and if they want, on their own schedule,” Cohesity wrote in a post, adding that the company will all the existing on-prem and cloud workloads.
Together, the combination protects hundreds of exabytes of data, serves 10,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100 and 80% of the Global 500 enterprises, and targets a total addressable market of over $30 billion, according to Cohesity.
The company also aims to lead the next era of artificial intelligence- (AI-) powered data security and management, Poonen said. “Cohesity’s scale-out architecture [is] 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.”
