Cohesity announced last night that it would acquire the NetBackup & Alta assets of Veritas, to create a company with a combined annual revenue of $1.6B. So many thoughts.
I remember when Veritas acquired BackupExec from Seagate in 1999 and said they would combine the product lines, which never happened. I remember when Symantec acquired Veritas, and they said the combined data backup and data security tools would take over the world. That never happened. They spun it back out a few years later. The same thing happened when EMC acquired Avamar in 2006, and said they were going to combine Avamar and NetWorker. They still have two separate product lines. I have distant memories of similar things happening at other companies.
Suffice it to say I’m skeptical of an eventual combined product line of the two products, primarily because of that history and the fact that they said in the press release they would continue to maintain the product roadmaps of both companies.
I watched the video from Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity and the new combined company. What I think he thinks is going to happen is the Cohesity product will be able to start supporting all those legacy platforms that Veritas supports by using the code that Veritas has for those platforms. I wish him and Cohesity the best of luck at doing that, and I truly mean no sarcasm there. (I will say I will be surprised if they are successful.)
I also want to speak for a moment about BackupExec and Enterprise Vault. (Based on what I can peace together, that part of the business was about $200M/year, which is not nothing.) What is to become of them? I can see BackupExec getting spun out to its own company, but Enterprise Vault is its own thing. One of its biggest advantages WAS that it could share hardware with NetBackup, but that’s now in jeopardy. Will it survive on its own? I’d be very surprised.
As I said, I wish Cohesity and the DP team from Veritas the best of luck as they move forward. History is not on their side, but maybe this time they’ll make it happen.
Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at S2|DATA, which helps companies manage their legacy data
I’ve worked in NetBackup shops, and EV shops. Interestingly- never both at the same time. My experience in a highly regulated environment with EV would indicate that it does work fine stand-alone. In addition, the long tail associated with such a product makes it very difficult to swap out. It might not be a growth area and I think they overlap has been a good selling point at least at some level- but I don’t see it going away any time soon.
Thanks for the comment! EMC’s SourceOne is it’s biggest competitor, and it had a long tail too. And EMC is EOLing it at the end of this year. You’d think that would be good news for EV, but it doesn’t look like it. No one seems to be talking online about migrating to EV from SourceOne.