There's a lot going on in the data protection and cyber security markets - it can be hard to keep up with all the news. That's where The Competitive Corner's Newsletter comes in, to help curate and distill the most pertinent movers and shakers each month to make your job easier.
April was a busy month in the data protection market with several key event such as the #Rubrik IPO itself as acquisitions by both #Commvault and #Veeam. Additional newsmakers include #Veritas, #Cohesity, #Wasabi, #Acronis, and more. Below you'll find a breakdown of why these news items matter to you, links to the original articles, and related blogs for further research and insights.
April 2024 Competitive Headlines:
(click any headline to jump directly to the analysis)
IDC puts out their latest data protection market share figures
Commvault acquires Appranix for accelerated disaster recovery
Veeam acquires Coveware to provide security assessment & incident response services
Cohesity's CEO discusses the Veritas acquisition and delays in their own IPO ideas
Wasabi launches new digital asset management (DAMS) solution: Wasabi AiR
Acronis launches new partner-powered MDR offering for their MSP customers
Veritas adds new AI-powered cyber security features for NetBackup
Veritas' spinoff "Codename: DataCo" reveals their GTM strategy and product portfolio plans
Rubrik Announces Pricing of Upsized Public Offering + Goes Public
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
The Rubrik IPO was set for Thursday April 25th and they announced their target float price of $32/share for the market just a few days earlier. This was slightly higher than the $28-$31 range that had been discussed earlier in the week. With the IPO finally on the move, the Rubrik stock closed day 1 of trading up ~16% with a closing price of $37.00 at the end of trading on Thursday. The stock stayed pretty steady around the $37 price point the following day, but was trading down
over 5-7% in early trading the next Monday and over the course of their first full week of trading the Rubrik stock finished almost right where it started just above $32. It will be interesting to follow how the stock performs.
Early analysis from financial experts are maintaining a cautious position on Rubrik, stating that while the company has many positives in terms of recent growth and ARR there remains the issues around losses and perhaps an overly high valuation. With Rubrik’s books now out in the public eye, there is intense scrutiny on the company to perform. Their Q1 results will be dissected and analyzed ad nauseum as the industry looks to see if Rubrik really is all they claim to be.
Link to one of many post-IPO analysis articles here.
IDC: Veeam has the largest share of the data protection market - and growing fast.
[Link to Original Article ]
Why it Matters?
No real changes from the last one really except I'm shocked at the IBM 25% sequential growth (though their overall growth was barely above 0%). I agree as well that it looks very much like even the Cohesity + Veritas combined share won't jump them into 1st, though it should land them in the top 5.
Dell’s YoY growth was also very significant (thanks to Druva?) as was Commvault’s. Only Veritas
appears to be losing ground as overall market share distribution seems to be normalizing among the top 5. With the backup market heating up thanks to the Veritas acquisition and Rubrik IPO, it is expected we'll see more of M&A type actions over the coming quarters.
Commvault Announces Acquisition of Appranix, Accelerating and Advancing Cyber Resilience for Enterprises Globally
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
Commvault has acquired cloud resilience company Appranix for an undisclosed amount. Boston based Appranix specializes in cloud DR automation, specifically rebuilding key infrastructure elements of an environment such as DNS, security groups, and other components necessary for recovery from disasters like ransomware. Appranix also has coverage across Azure, AWS, and GCP which plays well into the Commvault GTM for data protection across multi-cloud.
This is the 3rd acquisition for Commvault under Sanjay's leadership (Hedvig and TrapX being the previous ones). Based on the PR messaging I would expect them to position the IP as part of their ransomware recovery suite and perhaps roll into their Auto Recovery and Clean Room Recovery offerings. Product integration is expected around the Summer 2024 timeframe.
Veeam Launches Most Complete Support for Ransomware - from Protection to Response and Recovery - with Acquisition of Coveware
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
It’s important to note that this is NOT a product or software solution - it is a service. Coveware provides ransomware incident response and proactive preparedness services for customers. This ranges from security posture assessments and recommendations to actual negotiation with ransomware gangs for a better price. They are also capable of conducting forensic analysis post-incident.
This is certainly an interesting move by Veeam and one that does reflect an overall shift in the data security narrative we’re seeing in the market as a whole. In the beginning, vendors were all boasting about their abilities to prevent attacks, which then moved to talking about how well their solutions could detect attacks. Now, the market is shifting to the realities that despite all your best efforts you WILL get hit at some point, so they are pivoting their GTM to focus on how well they can help
customers with incident response and recovery.
So, with this acquisition Veeam is taking a more pragmatic approach of “no matter what we do there’s
always the likelihood of a successful attack” and we have the right services to help with those recovery efforts. No financials were disclosed.
Cohesity CEO on Veritas Acquisition Update, Delayed IPO and Latest Funding Round
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
Surprising nobody, Cohesity's CEO (never shy to speak to the press...or literally anybody about his ideas) has come out and admitted that any IPO plans have been pushed out while the company "focuses on the Veritas acquisition". Personally, I'd think it's more likely that the market
wouldn't support 2 nearly identical backup appliance vendors going public in the same time period - so funding might not have been favourable to support that path, but would support another: The Veritas buy. From a financial perspective, not to mention the perspectives of the various VC/PE firms involved, getting a stake in Cohesity and getting some cash back for Veritas is a much better win for
them.
Will Cohesity go public? Perhaps, but that is now likely several years from now given the $7bn (mostly debt) that they will be taking on. Once the dust settles on the pending buy of Veritas (remember, it's not closed and done yet!) we'll see where things are at for Cohesity.
Wasabi Technologies Introduces Wasabi AiR, Pioneering Intelligent Media Storage for Sports, Media, and Entertainment Industries
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
As predicted when Wasabi acquired Curio AI back in January, Wasabi is stepping beyond the basic cloud storage game with the introduction of "Wasabi AiR", a new solution targeting sports, media, and entertainment data management. This is more commonly referred to as "DAMS" (digital asset management) whereby an indexing solution is leveraged for keeping track of what media content is stored where, what it contains, etc. This makes a data lake filled with various video and audio media clips and recording searchable and the data itself much more easily accessible.
Curio AI specializes in intelligent indexing and storage tiering for digital media. Leveraging their AI model, Curio can generate a library or catalog of media content (including video) as it can index things such as specific voices, logos, faces, and objects within the media enabling powerful search and archive/retrieval services for these large and hard to index data sets. This was the first acquisition for Wasabi and no sum was disclosed.
This signals a shift for Wasabi into a completely new market: Digital Asset Management (DAMs). This market consists of very large data sets that often have a very long retention cycle and could be a significant boost for Wasabi in terms of storage consumption. This could also see them looking for new partners to help provide the engine to ingest such vast data quantities which could then be indexed by the new Wasabi AiR solution. I would expect to see some much more aggressive campaigning from Wasabi as they focus on acquiring new logos among the sports/media/ entertainment market.
Acronis: MDR is not new, but MDR with built-in Recovery is
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
Well…actually NOT. Druva and several other vendors have been doing this for a while now🙂
Acronis has turned to one of their certified partners, Novacoast, to provide 24/7/365 managed detection and response (MDR) services for their MSP customers. The service is positioned as an "add-on" for MSPs so that they can focus on their business and growth rather than having to dedicate resources to monitoring their backup environment. This is essentially Acronis providing an outsourced security monitoring service for their MSP clientele providing detection, response, remediation and recovery.
Veritas Strengthens Cyber Resilience with New AI-Powered Solutions
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
Veritas has added some AI into their cyber security toolkit with the introduction of what they are calling "self-defending" data protection solutions. Once you get through the jargon it looks like Veritas' AI copilot can monitor not just for anomalous data patterns in the backup, but also anomalous behaviour in admin/user activities within NetBackup and Alta Data Protection (also NetBackup...). Not only can it flag these potentially threatening behaviours, but it can automagically make adjustments to the security settings and access controls within their platform (MFA and 4-eyes)
to lock down the solution and protect against potentially malicious activities.
Veritas spinout set to innovate as Cohesity acquires key divisions
[Link to Original Article]
Why it Matters?
The "yet to be named Veritas spinoff currently known as Codename:DataCo" is opening up around their plans for attacking the market with the bulk of the old Veritas portfolio.
Primarily, they will be dividing the business into 3 separate business units, each with their own
independent customer facing teams and product teams, but sharing the same head office functions such as executive and finance.
These 3 new BUs will be:
Infoscale - One of Veritas' oldest products, this storage virtualization solution is relied on by many large finance institutions and is a very sticky solution. It enables customers to transition from one storage (or cloud) infrastructure to another with ease. This is critical for ongoing evergreen/refresh projects as well as disaster recovery.
Data Compliance - This BU is apparently already running at $100M+ ARR and is made up of
products such as Enterprise Vault, Alta eDiscovery, Alta Surveillance, IT Analytics (APTARE), and a number of other classification, PII, and content management tools.
Backup Exec - Once again, this is one of the original products that made up the Veritas backup portfolio decades ago (yes, decades...). This SMB focused backup product currently carries a $50M ARR and is well established in that market segment. It sounds as though they will be targeting Veeam as they attempt to reinvigorate the BExec sales engine.
Infoscale and the Data Compliance BUs play up in mid-market and enterprise spaces and while adjacent to our backup business, I would not expect it to drag along the Backup Exec solution given its SMB roots. However, I would expect renewed focus on selling BE into the small to midsize backup market.
Written by Matt Tyrer. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.