It’s Official: Cohesity Closes Veritas Acquisition, Claims No.1 Data Protection Software Prize

Cohesity has closed its long-planned acquisition of the enterprise data protection business of Veritas, centered around Veritas NetBackup, in a move the company says makes it the largest company in the business by market share. But industry heavyweight Veeam says it remains at the top.

Data protection and cyber resilience software vendor Cohesity closed its long-planned acquisition of Veritas’ enterprise data protection business Tuesday, vaulting the company from its number seven market share position to what it calls the number one spot.

With the acquisition, Cohesity now has a customer base of over 12,000 businesses, including 85 percent of the Fortune 100 and almost 70 percent of the world’s 500 largest enterprises.

The new Cohesity has over 3,000 channel and technology partners, along with strategic partnerships with the leading cloud and on-premises infrastructure providers, the company previously told CRN.

Cohesity executives were not immediately available to discuss details of the final closing of the acquisition.

However, Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen last month told CRN that the combined company is ready to be the first data protection technology developer to cross the $1-billion mark in revenue in only 11 years and is laying the groundwork for quick growth to $2 billion and beyond.

“[Veritas] takes us from number seven in this space to number one, and that’s a good position to be in,” Poonen said. “We obviously want to stay humble and hungry. But for an 11-year-old company to get to number one in a very crowded space—there’s 50 players in this market—it’s a big moment.”

Poonen also told CRN that the new Cohesity would be a profitable pro-forma $1.7-billion revenue company with a 28-percent adjusted EBITDA and ARR (annual recurring revenue) of $1.5 billion. That would make Cohesity the largest data protection software vendor by market share and Tuesday the company said that has become the case based on industry analyst and internal data.

Taking the No. 1 spot from current data protection industry leader Veeam will not be so easy. Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran last week told CRN that his company is a very profitable company, which has 29-percent EBITDA and generated almost half a billion dollars in cash in 2024. Veeam also has $1.7 billion-plus in ARR, Eswaran said.

“It’s interesting to see [Cohesity] celebrating buying three-quarters of their company's revenue,” he said. “There’s no easy path to integration. I see a lot of employee and customer uncertainty. Veritas has always been one of Veeam’s largest share donors. We’ve seen even more interest since the acquisition announcement from the amount of customer and employee traffic we see coming to Veeam. It’s huge. I actually feel this is going to be a good thing for Veeam. We are number one now by a significant margin. Let's see what happens when the new data is published. I expect to continue to remain number one by market share.”

(Cohesity insists that industry analysts calculate market share by revenue, rather than ARR, because ARR is not a GAAP metric.)

Cohesity has acquired the enterprise data protection business of Veritas, centered around that company’s NetBackup business, which has about 500 connectors to source systems and a large base of intellectual property.

The part of Veritas that Cohesity did not acquire—Backup Exec, InfoScale, and the vaulting compliance business—is now part of a new company called Arctera. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Arctera serves 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, and has more than 650 patents and over 1,500 global employees.