Interview: Now that Veritas and Cohesity are one company underneath the Cohesity brand there are is a larger than 12,000 customer base, with 8,000 from Veritas and 4,500 from Cohesity. They have been assured that no customer will be left behind, but what happens now in a product sense?
We had a conversation with Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen to look at that issue, noting that there are Cohesity applications like Fort Knox and Data Hawk working on top of a Cohesity backup store. Will these applications be extended to work with Veritas backup stores?
Poonen said yes, they would and cyber recovery orchestration tools, analytic and AI tools, like Gaia, will be extended to work with either NetBackup or Cohesity DataProtect data.
We asked if Cohesity would be developing a single management plane to cover both the Cohesity and Veritas environments. Poonen answered: “Yes. In fact, I would take it a step further because with every month and quarter that we’re together now the engineers are spending more time … working on a roadmap.”
“Our management control plane, …Helios, the best in the industry, with ease of use and very API rich, will become the management control plane for both actors.” We could think of them like a Mercedes (Veritas) and a Tesla (Cohesity).
NetBackup from Veritas and Cohesity’s DataProtect will both have a common management plane: “That’s a huge step. Nobody will be able to provide that management consistency to both NetBackup and DataProtect.”
There’s more: “At the bottom of it is the file system and the place where the data is stored. That will become our platform because we left the Veritas file system with Arctera.”
The Veritas customers won’t get left behind: “Certainly we will support our customers. We have the ability to do that with Veritas files for the customers are using that. But the go-forward platform for where the data is stored is SpanFS from Cohesity.” Poonen said he thinks the SpanFS data platform is the best in the industry.
Veritas NetBackup has a source connector count advantage, with Poonen saying: “One of the advantages NetBackup had was they had hundreds of connectors, almost 500, more than anybody else. We can now bring that common connector framework to DataProtect.”
“Both companies will have connector parity and that us gives tremendous advantage, to take all of those connectors and bring it to both products very quickly. It’s not a complicated project.”
There’s more to come again, with Poonen saying: “The actual backup applications themselves … you can start to containerize that where they actually start to dissolve together. You can then start using components of each other and then you have almost one codebase.”
“This then pretty much give customers a seamless path to the next generation. … It’s a very exciting time. We think we can unify the codebase of the products very quickly. We’re giving customers the path to the future.”
Cohesity is saying to both its NetBackup and DataProtect customer bases that it can lower their costs. Customers need not worry that, after Veritas and Cohesity joining together, their costs will rise. Poonen said: “Our view is that the total cost of ownership can go down and that’s a very gratifying thing.”
On the generative AI front we asked if Cohesity was looking at agentic AI? Poonen said: “Yes, absolutely. In fact, we’ve been playing with some of the latest work of Operator AI. We’ll have a little demo that you’ll see in the next week or two. It’s not very difficult to do and our vision is that you could think of Gaia not just as an app but also as an agent framework.
Interestingly: “The way the name Gaia started was that we were looking for a code name for the project and we called it generative AI app, generative AI agent.”
“It can be an app or an agent and, in fact, you’ll see with the prototype with Operator AI, the agent framework of OpenAI, [it] can drive our management control plan and we’ve been able to get that working. We’re using it also internally for areas like support where we can search documents.” Perhaps in the future customers will be able to use it too.
Pondering the arrival of DeepSeek, Poonen wonders whether the result is a cylinder or hourglass, telling us about his model of this: “We see the AI stack at three layers, roughly three layers. There’s an AI going bottom up, top down. There’s an AI hardware and software infrastructure layer. That’s where Nvidia, both the hardware of Nvidia and the software of Nvidia system, other middleware components, exist.”
“Then the middle is the large language model foundation model .. and the top of the stack is AI applications.” He has apps like Salesforce in mind there.
“What the world is trying to figure out is that, in economic value, is this a cylinder or an hourglass? The hourglass means the middle of it is valuable but there’s not a lot of economic value created there. The economic value is created at the bottom for infrastructure companies and hardware players like Nvidia. …and account value created [at the top] by software players like Salesforce.”
He thinks ”in that model all of these techniques really drive the company that has the most data.”
So, getting back to the Cohesity-Veritas combo: “We protect hundreds of exabytes of data, which is significantly more than all of our main competitors combined. We think that ultimately creates value. I call that a very similar market to Salesforce.”
“All of these technologies, agent AI and so on, need to find ultimately something that creates economic value. And for the app companies it will be the company that has the data.”
“So companies like Databricks, Cohesity in our world ,and then in the app world, companies like SAP and Salesforce, and then at the bottom layer, the hardware companies, I do think all of them, starting with Nvidia, will have value. So that’s how we view the AI framework.”
There are 5,500 employees in the new Cohesity. The three big parts of the two original businesses are being combined; sales, customer support and R and D. Poonen said: “We’ve got to make that 5,500 employee base really engaged. They’ve got to be excited. I’ve always believed you serve your employees first. They take care of customers, but it always starts with that employee.”
A second priority is to build product innovation; “five or ten x better than any alternative. … And then the third is customer obsession.”
Summary
There is very little overlap between the Veritas and Cohesity customer bases. What we are seeing here is that Veritas customer’s NetBackup-protected data will be stored in the Cohesity filesystem in the future with a common Veritas-Cohesity management plane being developed around the Helios technology. Software containerization will be used to unify the NetBackup and DataProtect codebases so that a single backup product emerges.
