Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for RSAC 2025. It's our ninth year of live coverage of RSA, my 15th year covering it, and of course this is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE where we extract the signal from the noise. We were doing it for 15 years. Our next guest has been a CUBE alumni on all 15 years of theCUBE. He's got legacy status, OG status, Sanjay Poonen, president and CEO of Cohesity. He's running a company right now scaling up his playbook. Sanjay, 15 years extracting the signal from the noise, you've been a key contributor. Thank you for coming on and supporting us, and congratulations on continued success at Cohesity now with Veritas' combination. Great to have you back.
Thank you, John. I think I was there in your first or second show at Sapphire 15 years ago where I heard you use the same expression, extracting the signal from the noise, and here you are. You're in your setup, you're at RSA and you still have that great expression. You should trademark it.
It's funny, I went back and found an old blog post from 2005 where I said, 'Open source media is on an old type pad blog,' but I also went back and looked at the old SiliconANGLE. Our original motto was where computer science meets social science, selecting the signal from the noise. Open source media is now a big thing. Our NYSE wired relationship, open community trust networks are forming. A lot of this stuff is evolving and with Gen AI, this is a big part of this whole generational shift. I guess it took 20 years to figure out podcasting and all the openness that's going on. We're so proud to just do this, and I get a lot of emails, 'Thank you for being the top executive.'
You've done well. You and Dave been friends for many years. Great to watch your progress in this and at the various different events, whether it's re:Invent or Google, you guys are there. It's great.
Some call us the ESPN of tech and you're a tech athlete. We've been following your career.
Sapphire, SAP, VMware, Cohesity, Sanjay, you are well known for scaling businesses. You're bold, you make bold moves, you make pragmatic moves, organic inorganic growth. Cohesity is a company that has great technical DNA. We've covered it here on theCUBE, but with Cohesity and Veritas' combination with cyber resilience, now distributed computing, full hybrid, the convergence of cloud native and Gen AI and infrastructure all coming together at the same time. It's a societal impact. There's real impact on humanity, but there's innovation now. So I really want to ask you, one, since we last spoke, you got Veritas under your wings. What's the lift look like? What's the integration been like and where's the innovation? What are you eyeing?
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, John. I mean, listen, when I joined the company two and a half years ago, Cohesity built the best platform for cyber resilience, a zero trust platform. In 2013, Mohit who was on a show when the company, I did a good interview with him, invented this notion of hyper-converged zero-trust platform for data and all the companies that came after us cloned his architecture. So we were the first to that in 2013. And what Veritas had done many decades before is built a really good backup application that stored data on a separate appliance like a Data Domain. Now, you take that very powerful backup application with thousands of connectors and snap it onto our platform, which is what we're doing, and offer customers a seamless way to be able to get to the next generation platform, which is this Cohesity data platform at their time and leisure. We don't have to build new platform, we have it. It's wins because of speed, of scale, of security. Its simplicity. It's smart. It's the 5S's, we like to call it. So we began thinking over the course of 2024 about how fast we could accelerate the integration because we had about 10, 11 months to wait for regulatory approvals, and then we closed the deal on December 10th and here we are 90, 100 days and innovation's flowing. We announced our first product that's come together from the combination called recovery agent at this conference, it's all focused on cyber resilience and speed of recovery. You're going to see us snapping together. NetBackup on top of our platform, they have a supersonic API called OST that we... I saw the first fruits of that being integrated into our platform last week. It's beautiful. It's going to come out in the fall and it's the same thing that NetBackup wrote on top of Data Domain. We will now build it only to our platform and a few others, nobody else. So we have a tremendous sense of how this is going to view. The new company is about three times the size of what Cohesity was before. We were about a $550 million company. Now we're close to a $2 billion company, rule 40 characteristics. So profitable growth and we think we... Number 1 in market share, 13,000 customers, 85% of the Fortune 100 and 170% of the Global 500. Here's the killer part. We protect hundreds of exabytes of the world's data. That's almost 10 times all of our competitors put together. So we're in a very good position now to take this to the next level as we look at the next coming quarters and years.
I was talking with Brian Baumann, who's the founder of NYC Wired, part of our collaboration at CUBE. We put the NYC and theCUBE together from a community standpoint, and he had an expression I love, which was, 'You plant the soil and watch the fruit come off the tree.' What has been some of that fruit? Can you point to something on the results? What's different? The new products, you mentioned a few of them, what's been the big breakthrough when you look at Veritas plus Cohesity? Of course, we were speculating out of the gate, obviously install base. What's that horizontal? Because once you connect, it's like there's enough overlap where it takes and then things just flow across cross-pollinate. What has been some of the breakthroughs?
Yeah. I think first off, reflecting on the fact that we didn't have to build something new. When Oracle bought PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, they had to build a new Fusion application platform and it took them five days. We already have the world's best platform. This was Mohit's invention. Incredible. It's faster. It scales better, and it's built with zero trust principles from the get-go. So that's number one. Number two, NetBackup brings these 1,100 connectors. Over 1,000 connectors to all the source systems, the largest workload connector list so we can get to any source of data and ingest that into our platform. That's a huge advantage, and that brings you the combination of security and scale. Then the third is Nvidia was watching what we were doing in AI, and I think I talked to you the last time we talked about this. We were building a retrieval augmented generation capability to directly interrogate data that's in our platform. Never been done before. We were the first to do it. Nvidia noticed that and invested in one company, John the space, Cohesity. Jensen featured us at the GTC Conference in 2024 last year and again 2025. So we're excited to have them in our tap table. We're working closely with them. You were at Google, we were announced in Thomas Kurian's show, one of the most prominently featured companies in our space. So Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, all working closely with us in this AI move. I think you could think of us like a Palo Alto meets Databricks. We are an AI-powered data security company, and that's a very special place to be in.
It is funny. A lot of the data back in recovery, people just put rebrand, put new paint on the logo and saying we're cyber resilience. You guys had the platform, Mohit, it's very technical. You mentioned you have the architecture. One of the top trends that we were talking about on the kickoff today was cloud security and the on-prem is hot. That's basically hybrid cloud. So that's a hot area here this week. Obviously, all this stuff like ransomware, social engineering, but cloud security is still front and center. The network, so storage has certainly changed in the relationship to AI factories, Nvidia's big play. So with all that as a backdrop, you got the distributed computing cloud security on-prem, which essentially is a private cloud, but we won't parse the semantics. What does that mean to you guys? Because you had a saying last time we talked, no customers left behind. In a lot of these ways, customers can be left behind if they make the wrong choice. How are you looking at the customer position vis-a-vis the landscape that they got challenged the cloud security, I got the on-prem, how does my data be ready for AI? All these things are complex.
Yeah. So first off, when we think about workloads, they're going to be I think three in the private cloud. I would've said only VMware, but right now it's VMware and Nutanix and Red Hat, OpenShift virtualization, and then four in the public cloud, AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and appropriately SaaS apps that run on top of them like Salesforce, M365, Google Workspace. We have the largest workload coverage of any of them to protect those workloads. Now, one of the things that we've been able to crack that allows this customer of either Veritas, NetBackup, which is 9,000 of them or the 4,500 that came from Heritage to Cohesity to get innovation seamlessly. I've been through this with VMware, with AirWatch, SAP with business objects. It's not my first road here to do in big deals. You've got to find a seamless way by which customers can move from their current state to a new state in a non-disruptive fashion, and that's what we're doing. So at a NetBackup customer, you're going to be able to snap onto the Cohesity platform seamlessly. We're going to build that OSD APIs to only that platform and nobody else among our competitors-
Define seamlessly. What does that mean?
So NetBackup today was writing to another storage platform like Data Domain. It can run seamlessly to our platform without doing anything the same NetBackup version that you're writing. So now you get the power of all that wonderful software platform that Mohit built for free. In fact, we have a special renewal program that tells our customers, 'Renew with us for three years, we'll give you the Cohesity data platform for free with just your ability to renew with us for a couple of years.' Okay. So that's one example. Secondly, if you're a Cohesity customer, what are you getting from this for free? You're getting all of these wealth of connectors that NetBackup built, thousands that just add the platform. So when you look at this, both customer bases are getting innovation much faster than either company could have done on their own.
So it's not just cross pollination, it's seamless integration and capabilities?
And having a pathway, all of you said by which they can go to the next version of what they have without disruption at all, and when you talk to both customer bases, they love this. Now, all of this will work from one user console, our management control plane called Helios that launches these. So when you show customers the product, you show them innovation, I mean it's been really good. And yeah, the no customer left behind message is one where all of those 9,000 customers of Veritas, we want to lock them in, put a motor around them, take care of them, take them to the promised land so to speak, but then take off 4,500 customers of Cohesity and continue to grow that. We think we're now about 13,000 customers, so we've added 9,000 customers on December 10th the day we close the deal, I think we could take this to 15, 18, 20,000 customers. We're focused on the enterprise, so we're really focused on the top customers in the Fortune 1000 and the global 2000.
So your business metrics are hitting your marks.
We're very happy with it. I mean, good renewals are looking really good. We're looking at customers. I mean the conversation, I set myself a goal to talk to 1,000 customers of Veritas. I haven't quite gotten them. About 6,700 in the last 12 months or so, but that was a goal for this year too. I think we can make something and we're not going to go public this year, but the idea is to get the setup so that we could possibly think about that next year.
I think the last time we chatted you called it rarefied air. This is like you're hitting the numbers, you have the benchmark to go public, but you still got more word to do. We've got more touches, more-
I mean, Cohesity was about a $550 million company last year, growing the fastest any in space and just turned profitable. When I got to the company, we were a little over 300 million in revenue, but highly unprofitable. And now we got to the point where we were growing well very fast, but just turned profitable. Now, you add the Veritas business, which was NetBackup, which was immensely profitable and growing some. You now have a rule of 40 company that's approaching 2 billion, rule of 40, at the right point in time. We'll take it out and it's the market share leader. Number seven, combined with number two, you're number one.
It's not like you're not pivoting anything, you're just growing. I love this business school conversation too. At the same time you have Beachhead to secure because you got an integration by default, you made your company much bigger with the combination, three times bigger. You got to lock that Beachhead down and then you have to grow strategy. So my next question is, okay, what's coming on here? You're in the midst of doing that, hitting the numbers, rule 40, et cetera. What's the core news here at RSA? What are some of the meetings you got? I know you were at an investor conference. You mentioned Recover Agent is here. What are some of the big news? What's the talking points for you here? What's the top track?
Yeah. First off, Recover Agent's a hot product. We won an ounce product here. We were awarded by one of the Cyber Resilience Awards, the best in our category. We're proud of that award. One of our prominent board members was probably one of the best cyber fighters in the world, Kevin Mandia, he's all over the show here talking in many of the keynotes. So I've told him to shamelessly plug Cohesity. We love it when Kevin Mandia's talking about the one company's on the board off. And then we've got a lot of brand awareness. If you watch the buses and cars and the number of Cohesity cars that talk about cyber recovery and resilience and recovery assurance. So we're bringing the brand.
Can't miss green. Green is money, and green is go.
