Through the merger, Cohesity aims to carve out Veritas’ data protection business to create a new entity in data security and management with numerous product offerings to help clients meet their requirements for data security and data insights
Veritas’ data protection business to be acquired by Cohesity in $7bn deal. (Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data security and management firm Cohesity has agreed to acquire the data protection business of secure multi-cloud data resilience company Veritas in a deal that would value the combined entity at about $7bn.
Through the merger, Cohesity aims to carve out Veritas’ data protection business to create a new entity in data security and management with numerous product offerings to help clients meet their requirements for data security and data insights.
According to the parties, the joint company’s scaled research and development (R&D) investment and accelerated innovations will benefit customers.
Besides, the combined innovations of Cohesity and Veritas will directly address the difficulties by offering organisations an extensive, multi-cloud data protection portfolio with a centrally managed hyper-converged platform.
The merged company is also projected to bring together 100s of exabytes of data protected, a global go-to-market footprint and a strong partner ecosystem.
Furthermore, the proposed firm will continue to invest in and advance the roadmap and strategy of all Cohesity products and services and Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup appliances, and Alta data protection offerings.
Cohesity president and CEO Sanjay Poonen said: “This deal will combine Cohesity’s speed and innovation with Veritas’ global presence and installed base.
“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.”
Following the transaction, the remaining assets of Veritas’ businesses will form a separate company, dubbed DataCo.
DataCo will include Veritas’ InfoScale, Data Compliance, and Backup Exec businesses, and will function autonomously.
Veritas CEO Greg Hughes said: “Veritas and Cohesity share a common vision of empowering businesses to protect their critical data assets in the face of evolving cyber threats and complex hybrid cloud environments.
“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 multi-cloud era.”
Subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions, the deal is anticipated to be completed by the end of this year.
J.P. Morgan Securities and PJT Partners were Cohesity’s exclusive M&A financial and debt capital markets advisors. Simpson Thacher and Bartlett and Gunderson Dettmer served as primary legal advisors to Cohesity.
Guggenheim Securities and Morgan Stanley served as Veritas’ financial advisors while Alston & Bird and Latham & Watkins acted as Veritas’ legal counsel for the transaction.