Arctera emerges as spinoff from Veritas-Cohesity merger
Three separate backup and storage offerings from Veritas will continue development under the name Arctera. One analyst believes the spinoff will be a boon for SMB customers.
Veritas' spinoff of three brands will mean business as usual for those applications and services once its parent company merges with Cohesity.
Arctera, previously referred to as DataCo, will oversee the sale and development of the three former Veritas businesses: InfoScale, Backup Exec, and the products within the Data Compliance and Governance group. Lawrence Wong, former senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Veritas, will be the CEO of the new Arctera.
Cohesity, a data protection SaaS company, bought Veritas' data protection business in February and expects the deal to close by late 2024.
The spinoff will likely be a boon for customers of the three sub-brands, according to Jerome Wendt, president and lead analyst at Data Center Intelligence Group. Cohesity remains focused on enterprise customers, particularly those operating in the cloud, but SMBs still use services like Backup Exec and InfoScale.
"If Veritas had thrown them in for free, Cohesity likely would have taken them, but it rightfully wanted NetBackup -- its enterprise user base and all the backup data they possessed," Wendt said. "If it inherited these other products, they likely would have languished in much the same way they did under Veritas. I see this as a win-win for both Cohesity and Arctera."
Separate units, one company
The three separate platforms will operate as separate business units with Arctera serving as the parent company, according to the FAQ Veritas released. Each of these business units will have its own separate team for product development and marketing.
InfoScale is a software-defined storage platform focused on the high availability of data in hybrid cloud environments. The Data Compliance and Governance business, a collection of services and products, provides data visibility, security and governance tools. Backup Exec offers cloud data backup and protection for hybrid environments into S3-compatible object storage.
"No customer or product will be left behind," Wong said in a video on Arctera's website regarding the separation. "We'll be a brand-new company, but one that already has market-leading products and established partner ecosystem and go-to-market function."
The separation of Backup Exec from the larger Veritas portfolio could help the development of that application in particular, Wendt said. He noted that most of Veritas' development efforts were focused on NetBackup, an enterprise backup platform and appliance, and Alta Data Protection, a cloud-native extension of NetBackup. Cohesity has said it plans to incorporate these products in a future offering.
"Under Arctera, Backup Exec becomes the flagship backup product that it can target at midsize enterprises with 1,000 [to] 5,000 employees," Wendt said. "I expect to see more, not less, news about Backup Exec going forward and more enhancements to it."
The new Arctera will serve a different customer base, but I do see it having a future.
Krista CaseAnalyst, The Futurum Group
Arctera's two other divisions are already served by Cohesity's own offerings and make sense to separate out, according to Krista Case, an analyst at The Futurum Group. Cohesity already offers a collection of data classification tools, and InfoScale is more suited for on-premises applications and hardware, she said.
"It is an area that Cohesity has also invested in its own set of rich data classification capabilities since its inception -- so it makes sense to keep that offering with the new Arctera," Case said. "The new Arctera will serve a different customer base, but I do see it having a future."
Arctera will remain its own private company under the ownership of the Carlyle Group, a private equity and asset management firm, according to the Veritas FAQ.
Cohesity, meanwhile, maintains codevelopment ambitions for its combined future with Veritas, expecting to increase the company from 3,500 customers to more than 10,000 once the deal closes.
In an interview with TechTarget Editorial earlier this year, Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen said he plans to continue to support both Cohesity and Veritas products for the foreseeable future.
"The key statement is, 'No customer left behind,'" he said.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
