Jason Buffington .com

This week, Cohesity announced it would acquire components of Veritas.

It would be easy to misjudge this from the outside, but most Veritas customers are unlikely to have much angst about this; most will see this as a good thing. CIOs and IT leaders don’t like switching; they supplement until it becomes untenable. It does not appear that Cohesity will force switching product lines, which makes the prognosis for Veritas’ customers to maintain what they already know and trust far less trepidatious than the VMware-Broadcom or Dell-EMC acquisitions of years past.

Veritas customers will keep their installed NetBackup software for their legacy workloads for as long as the maintenance costs and operational burdens for those products is less than the pain of change. Meanwhile, for any workload that they do want a better experience, Veritas customers can now acquire a more ‘modern’ solution (Cohesity) from their existing sales reps or channels. No, it won’t be seamless at the point of merger, but it will be far more seamless than if those customers wanted Rubrik, Commvault, or Veeam products.

Cohesity’s field will gain access and introduction into a massive install base of true enterprise customers, including not only current Veritas customers but also former Veritas customers in their CRM that may now be using Dell-EMC or IBM. They get the rolodex to farm.

The potential for Veritas users to solve their ‘modern data protection’ needs without leaving the Veritas ecosystem likely will slow the market share erosion that Veritas had been suffering against more modern competitors like Rubrik, Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity.

Both engineering teams just got Christmas early

Veritas has dominance in protecting the legacy workloads that large enterprises still require, but has struggled to keep up on more modern/cloud-hosted platforms. Meanwhile, Cohesity is earning a reputation of staying current on modern platforms, but lacks abilities for some of the legacy workloads that enterprises still require before they can abandon legacy backup solutions.

With the acquisition announced, almost anything that Veritas customers couldn’t protect with NetBackup before, they’ll soon be able to through Cohesity supplements — and Cohesity won’t have to devote engineering resources to address legacy enterprise workloads, because their legacy (NetBackup) offerings can address those. Veritas has a long history of proving it doesn’t know how to consolidate product lines or market across silos, but the Cohesity leadership ought to ensure that both sides simply need to focus on:

• Common instrumentation — control planes and dashboards will go a long way to softening running both stacks from an operational view, even if the underlying solutions still run completely independently.
• Consolidating GTM and routes to market — sales and marketing. If they can establish a common currency between Cohesity SKUs and NetBackup SKUs, so that customers and frictionlessly choose the right protection stack(s) as their production mix inevitably evolves over time, that will be an early indicator that Cohesity may retain far more of the Veritas install-base in the first year(s).
• Storage is key — NetBackup can write to just about anything, but part of Cohesity’s foundation is the premise that if you store it in Cohesity, you’ll have more agility later. Remember, Cohesity started as a secondary storage target for backup software solutions (including NetBackup); the good stuff and the solution shift came later.

The challenge will be that Veritas’ history of coexistence and synergy hasn’t always proven out (e.g. Veritas+Symantec, NetBackup v BackupExec); but if Cohesity does this right, then they just got a full second wind into the enterprise, beyond what Cohesity’s own engineering and GTM would have earned on their own.