Cohesity and Veritas have forged a definitive agreement, with Cohesity acquiring Veritas’ data protection business. This move will carve out Veritas’ data protection business to establish a new entity focused on data security and management.
Customers are expected to benefit from the accelerated innovations unlocked by the joint company’s scaled R&D investment, and what is considered one of the industry’s most extensive partner ecosystems.
Cohesity president and CEO Sanjay Poonen will lead the combined organisation in the same capacity and designation. Greg Hughes, CEO of Veritas, will serve as a board member and strategic advisor to Poonen after the close of the transaction.
The combination innovations of Cohesity and Veritas are intended to address directly the challenges related to protecting data, offering organisations a comprehensive, multicloud data protection portfolio.
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, NetBackup appliances, and Alta data protection offerings, while working towards the delivery of an integrated solution combining the best technology across the two companies.
“We will lead the next era of AI-powered data security and management by bringing together the best of both product portfolios — 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.
Together, the companies will target a total addressable market of over $30 billion. The expanded go-to-market breadth, geographic footprint, and R&D resources will allow the combined company to accelerate new customer adoption and help drive the deployment of innovative solutions within the fast-growing data security and management segment.
The transaction has been unanimously approved by each of Cohesity’s and Veritas’ boards of directors and is expected to close by the end of 2024, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.
Cohesity will finance the transaction through a combination of equity and debt. The transaction values the combined company at $7 billion.
“Bringing Veritas’ differentiated cloud-native architecture to Cohesity’s strong innovation engine will ideally position us to offer our customers transformative solutions against cyber attacks while delivering the flexibility and scalability required to thrive in the multicloud era,” said Hughes.
