When Cohesity completed its acquisition of Veritas’ enterprise data protection business in December 2024, it marked a big shift in the data protection landscape. With this shift, Cohesity now serves more than 13 600 enterprise customers, including more than 80 of the Fortune 100 companies and nearly 70% of the Global 500. The combined company now has pro forma annual revenue exceeding $1.7 billion and annual recurring revenue of $1.5 billion.
In an interesting discussion I had with Vasu Murthy, Cohesity’s chief product officer, we talked about how this business combination makes Cohesity better and accelerates innovation, and we discussed the challenges the combined company still has to overcome, says Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen. In this follow-up to a research paper I wrote ahead of the Cohesity-Veritas deal, I explore the key points of the acquisition and examine their implications for the combined company and its customers.
Key assets acquired from Veritas
Cohesity acquired several critical assets from Veritas, notably NetBackup and its appliance business, plus Veritas Alta data protection offerings. NetBackup is a long-established data protection solution for backup and recovery. Veritas Alta is a cloud data management platform that provides security and data protection for businesses. It also helps reduce costs by using less storage space, automatically moving data to more affordable storage options and minimising the manual work needed to manage and protect data. This can be especially useful to companies that need to secure and backup cloud applications like Salesforce. As Murthy put it, in this deal: “We specifically got the products that were most complementary to Cohesity and also can directly benefit our customers, which are proven data protection solutions.”
This acquisition also brought with it IT Analytics, an enterprise reporting solution previously called Aptare, which helps organisations simplify their data management. “Aptare is a well-known name in enterprise reporting, offering solutions for data management and other storage products,” Murthy said. “Customers can use it alongside their backup tools, which fits Cohesity’s existing portfolio well. Together, they make a more extensive and scalable data protection platform.”
How customers benefit from the Cohesity-Veritas combination
For NetBackup customers, the acquisition should bring an accelerated evolution in backup capabilities and tighter integration with Cohesity’s secure data platform. As Murthy noted: “By bringing NetBackup into the Data Cloud, Cohesity’s goal is to simplify how organisations manage data across hybrid environments while improving protection and visibility.” The addition of Cohesity Gaia – the company’s AI-driven engine for data security – adds deeper threat detection and automation to give customers the ability to respond to risks and carry out recovery efforts more effectively. I particularly like how this approach positions organisations to reduce complexity and turn data protection into a more strategic part of their operations.
For existing Cohesity customers, the combination should mean faster innovation, broader workload support and enhanced cyber resilience. With an expanded engineering team, Cohesity is set to accelerate product development, rolling out more than 20 new cloud connectors twice a year. “The combined engineering team is able to manage a broader portfolio of data protection and management tools,” Murthy said, adding: “Cohesity customers can expect improved AI-powered data security and management capabilities.”
Murthy told me that Cohesity discovered an unexpected advantage as it worked to integrate Veritas’ technology stack. Before the transaction, NetBackup had already undergone important modernisation steps, including shifts to micro-services and containerised processes. This enabled Cohesity to bring NetBackup functionalities into its ecosystem without substantial refactoring, making the integration smoother than anticipated. In the bigger picture, NetBackup’s architecture aligns well with Cohesity’s existing data platform, which is designed to handle secondary data at scale. Secondary data includes backups, archives and other copies of data that aren’t used for daily operations but are still important for recovery, analytics and compliance.
Challenges and market perceptions
As with most big acquisitions, bringing Cohesity and Veritas together hasn’t come without challenges. One of the biggest concerns from Veritas customers was the changes that might come with new ownership – especially around pricing, support and product direction. To get ahead of that, Cohesity laid out a transition plan with clear communication steps to help customers and partners feel confident about what’s next.
Cohesity hasn’t announced a formal “first 100 days” programme or the like to reintroduce every Cohesity and Veritas customer to new sales or support contacts, but based on what I’ve seen, customer engagement has clearly been a top priority. Cohesity’s CEO Sanjay Poonen has said he personally reached out to the top 1 000 Veritas customers to share the company’s vision and reassure them during the transition.
Poonen has returned many times to a simple but strong message: “No customer left behind.” From everything I’ve seen in researching the company and talking with its leaders and customers, it’s not just a tagline – it genuinely reflects the company’s commitment to continuity and support throughout the integration with Veritas. For customers, that means Cohesity will continue to invest in the tools they already rely on, while also giving them access to new capabilities and consistent support to keep their data protection strategies effective and up to date.
Internally, merging two companies that used to compete has required a thoughtful approach. Aligning sales teams, product priorities and overall strategy hasn’t been easy. But as Murthy told me, Cohesity is tackling it through global sales kickoffs, consistent messaging and regular customer outreach. He says these efforts are helping the combined team stay focused and show customers that they’re moving forward with a unified vision.
Cohesity identifies several key opportunities
One particularly intriguing part of my discussion with Murthy centred on the backup of ERP and SaaS applications. While ERP vendors such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft offer native data protection, many customers are unaware that these solutions operate under a shared responsibility model. This means that while cloud providers handle infrastructure security, customers are responsible for protection and recovery of their own data. Based on our conversation, it’s an issue that Murthy takes seriously.
According to Murthy, less than 15% of SaaS application business users actively back up their data, leaving many businesses vulnerable to cyber threats, accidental deletions or malicious actions. Unfortunately, while that number is clearly low, it doesn’t surprise me. The reality is that many enterprises still misunderstand the shared responsibility model. Again, the cloud provider is responsible for the infrastructure – things like physical security, hardware and the core platform – but the customer is still responsible for their own data, access controls, backups and compliance settings. The problem is that a lot of vendors don’t do a good job explaining this. In fact, some are downright unclear, or even misleading, about where their responsibility ends and where the customer’s begins. So, alas, it’s no surprise when customers assume their data is fully protected, only to find out after an incident that critical tasks like backup or data recovery weren’t covered. This disconnect continues to be one of the most common and costly blind spots in enterprise cloud adoption.
Cohesity is actively targeting a gap in data protection for mission-critical workloads – especially in ERP systems, electronic health records (EHR) and other core enterprise applications. These are areas where downtime or data loss can have serious business or compliance consequences, yet many organisations still lack strong backup strategies. Cohesity’s approach allows these workloads to be protected both on-premises and in the cloud, giving enterprises flexibility without sacrificing resilience.
To pursue this opportunity, Cohesity is aligning its product development and go-to-market efforts around these high-stakes environments. Whether it’s through optimised integrations, new backup capabilities tailored to complex systems like SAP or Epic, or targeted industry outreach, the company is making a clear move to position itself as a trusted solution for enterprise-grade data protection in these sensitive areas.
Beyond that, as the cyber security industry leans into more practical uses of AI, Cohesity is taking a similar approach – building in AI tools to help spot threats sooner, recover data faster and simplify day-to-day security operations. Cohesity’s push to release more cloud connectors is a direct response to where the industry is headed. Nearly 90% of companies now use more than one cloud platform, often mixing public and private environments, according to research by G2. That kind of sprawl makes it tough to keep data protected and recoverable. By broadening its multicloud support, Cohesity is giving organisations a more practical way to manage and secure data across all the places where data lives.
Delivering tangible value over the long term
The combination of Cohesity and Veritas could mark a big shift in the enterprise data protection industry, because it creates what should be a formidable player with more comprehensive data security solutions, greater global reach and a broader customer base. Fulfilling the promise of this combination will depend on effective technical integration, clear customer communication, a well co-ordinated go-to-market approach, and delivering on assurances of more innovation and support. Early results look good, but these are long-term commitments that require consistent execution for years on end.
Today, Cohesity is better equipped than ever to address evolving data protection needs, particularly in cloud services, AI-driven security and ERP/SaaS backup. As organisations navigate increasing cyber threats and complex cloud landscapes, Cohesity’s focus in these areas should serve it – and customers – well. While some challenges remain, such as pricing concerns and team alignment, Cohesity’s commitment to “no customer left behind” and ongoing integration and innovation will be key to delivering tangible value. The true measure of success will be how well Cohesity executes its roadmap and reassures customers that their data is more secure and accessible than ever before.
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