Cohesity has completed its “combination” with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business.
The company now claims to be the world’s largest data protection software provider by market share, saying it will serve over 12,000 customers – including over 85 of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500.
That’s “exabytes” of the world’s data, if you’re counting.
With the completion of this combination, Cohesity now offers the broadest workload support and one of the largest partner ecosystems in the data protection industry.
“This is a major milestone in the 11-year history of Cohesity, whose mission is to protect, secure, and provide insights into the world’s data,” said Sanjay Poonen, president and CEO, Cohesity. “By combining Cohesity’s scale-out architecture and strong generative AI and security capabilities – with Veritas’ broad workload support and extensive global footprint, our customers and partners stand to gain more value from their data than ever.”
Poonen says he will honour the company’s “no customer left behind” commitment, supporting existing products from both companies for years to come.
High praise, in capitals
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of capitalisation-focused company Nvidia has congratulated Cohesity and said that his no-lower-case letters firm is excited to partner with Cohesity as it builds out its generative AI products on top of the Nvidia AI Enterprise.
“Bringing together Cohesity and Veritas’ data protection business – the largest deal in the data protection space to date – addresses the growing need in the market to go beyond backing up and recovering data to handle issues around data security and insights for more robust cyber resilience,” said Daniel Newman, CEO, The Futurum Group.
Newman notes that Cohesity now has the largest workload support with a large presence and a massive joint ecosystem of service providers, VARs, SI partners and OEMs. The Futurum boss says that his team believes the company will be a key player as it expands beyond data protection, helping global CIOs exploit the potential for AI and turn organisational data into a competitive advantage.
Cohesity will target a total addressable market (TAM) of £31+ billion, which includes IDC’s data replication and protection software market.
IDC’s’ Semiannual Software Tracker, 2024H1, estimates the data replication and protection software market to be £9.3 billion in projected vendor sales in 2024.
Marquee money
The combined company received support from current “marquee investors” (an Americanisation used to denote startup/venture investors who are as significant as a ‘marquee’, which means a large sign board in the USA as opposed to a wedding tent in Britain) including Sequoia Capital, Softbank Vision Fund I, Wing Venture Capital, Premji Invest and Madrona.
The Carlyle Group is now one of the largest shareholders in the combined company.
Poonen has been affable, approachable and media-savvy to date. The days ahead in 2025 will tell us whether his attitude has shifted in any way as he stewards the new combined company status, we suspect he will hold a steady course.