Under a joint agreement, Cohesity, a leader in AI-powered data security and management, will combine with Veritas’ data protection business, to create a new leader in the data security and management market, “NewCo.” At the same time, Veritas’ InfoScale, Data Compliance, and Backup Exec businesses will spin-off to form a separate company, “DataCo.”

The combination of Veritas and Cohesity is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions with closing expected by the end of 2024.

Sanjay Poonen will be the CEO of NewCo, the combined company, and Lawrence Wong will be the CEO of DataCo. 

Greg will remain Veritas CEO through the closing period and will be on the Board of Directors of the combined company.

Customers will benefit from the accelerated innovations unlocked by the joint company’s scaled R&D investment, its unwavering support for customer success, and one of the industry’s most extensive partner ecosystems.

Protecting the world’s data and gaining insights from that data are top imperatives for IT practitioners all the way to board members. Every organization needs a cyber resilience strategy, given the rampant threat of ransomware. Furthermore, technology and business executives will have a unique opportunity to leverage the power of generative AI for data-driven insights to unleash new levels of efficiency, innovation, and growth.

The combined innovations of Cohesity and Veritas will offer organizations a comprehensive multi cloud data protection portfolio with a powerful, simple user experience, and a high-performance, centrally managed hyperconverged platform. This highly strategic combination assembles a new leader in the data security and management market with complementary product offerings to help customers address their needs for data security and data insights.

The combined company brings together 100s of exabytes of data protected, a global go-to-market footprint, high penetration in the enterprise with 96 of the Fortune 100 and 80% of the Global 500, and a strong partner ecosystem across all segments of cloud service providers, security players, VARs, system integrators, and hardware OEMs.

The current product roadmap and plans for any Veritas product will not change because of the announcement.

The combined company will continue to invest in and advance the roadmap and strategy of all Cohesity products and services, as well as Veritas NetBackup (NBU), Appliances, and Alta Data Protection while working towards delivery of an integrated solution combining the best of breed technology across the two companies.

The combined company and DataCo will ensure that that there is “no customer or partner left behind.” All products will continue to be supported. Customers can migrate when and if they want, on their own schedule. The combined company will build on Cohesity and Veritas’ extremely high customer satisfaction Net Promoter Scores, while providing the best product innovation via an engineering team that will be the largest of any data protection company in the space.

The best capabilities of the Cohesity Data Cloud platform and Veritas NBU, NBU Appliances and Alta Data Protection, will be factored into the combined company’s long-term solution, which will be designed by a joint team of Cohesity and Veritas engineers based on feedback from large enterprise customers.

The company will share its draft architecture plans with customers under NDA to solicit their input, and ensure their input factors into the combined company’s design plans, that will be finalized after the close of the transaction.

All workloads (on-prem and cloud) in the large coverage matrix already supported by both companies will continue to be supported in the company’s long-term solution. No workloads or storage targets will be left behind. For the cloud, the best aspects of Cohesity’s Cloud Services portfolio will be federated with Veritas’ Alta SaaS portfolio. We will leverage a dynamic universal adapter framework which will quickly enable more OnPrem, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS workload data protection. For planning migrations, a simplified migration plan for customers will be built and provided to customers using the combined company’s streamlined migration tools and services to make voluntary customer transition seamless, and almost “push-buttonlike” to the long-term solution. 

There are no immediate changes to how we develop and sell DataCo products or serve customers – all products will be supported. After the spin-off, DataCo will be a fully standalone company and have its own dedicated Sales, Marketing, R&D, Support and Services, aiming to deliver specialized solutions tailored precisely to its customers and markets.