At the 62nd edition of the IT Press Tour in Palo Alto, Cohesity opened its headquarters doors to showcase how the company's acquisition of Veritas has created something entirely new in the data protection space-an AI-powered cyber resilience platform that's already changing how enterprises think about their backup data.

The energy in Cohesity's conference room was palpable as CEO Sanjay Poonen kicked off what would become one of the most technically compelling briefings of this year's IT Press Tour. Six months after closing the Veritas acquisition, the company had promised to demonstrate real integration progress. What they delivered was something more ambitious: a complete reimagining of how artificial intelligence can transform enterprise data protection from a defensive afterthought into an active business intelligence weapon.

"We see ourselves as the protector, securer, and providing insights of the world's data," Poonen explained, setting the stage for what would become a masterclass in platform integration and AI strategy. But here's the thing-this wasn't just another vendor pitching AI buzzwords. The message was clear, the demos were live, the technical details were specific, and the results were measurable.

From Backup Vendor to AI-Powered Intelligence Platform

The numbers tell part of the story. Overnight, Cohesity went from the #7 player to the #1 market position, combining 4,000 Cohesity customers with 9,000 Veritas customers for a total addressable base of 13,000 organizations. The combined entity now protects what they estimate to be hundreds of exabytes of data globally-a scale that matters when you're building AI applications.

"Everything we do in security and AI works on large amounts of data," Poonen noted during the briefing. "Those algorithms run better on massive datasets. So the more data you have, the better your security, the better your AI is going to be."

This data gravity concept isn't just marketing speak. It's the technical foundation for what Greg Statton, VP of AI Solutions, demonstrated with Cohesity Gaia-their generative AI application that turns backup repositories into queryable business intelligence engines.

The Gaia Breakthrough: When Backups Become Business Intelligence

So what makes Gaia different from the typical enterprise AI implementations we've seen flooding the market? Instead of requiring data teams to extract, transform, and load backup data into separate AI platforms, Gaia applies retrieval augmented generation (RAG) directly to data sitting in backup storage.

Statton walked through a real customer example that perfectly illustrates the potential. "One of our early adopter customers had research and development facilities across the globe," he explained. "They wanted R&D teams to share research because individual silos meant somebody could discover something new about a polymer but wouldn't instantly share it with colleagues. If it was relevant to another piece of research, it could reduce time to market for new materials."

But here's where it gets interesting for IT teams. While implementing Gaia for R&D knowledge sharing, the organization's CIO discovered an unexpected use case. "We were already backing up all of our IT policies, procedures, and documentation. They put all of those into an index in Gaia and gave access to their support organization. They were able to reduce total time to resolution on support tickets in some cases by 40 percent by skipping the need to escalate to level three engineers."

That's not theoretical AI value-that's measurable operational improvement from data that was already being protected.

The Technical Architecture That Makes It Possible

What struck me most about the technical discussions wasn't the AI capabilities themselves, but the platform architecture that enables them. Vasu Murthy, Chief Product Officer, emphasized a point that separates Cohesity from traditional backup vendors: "Cohesity was not founded just to be a backup company. It was founded to be a data company."

The distinction matters. While competitors built backup applications that write to third-party storage systems, Cohesity built a data platform designed to run multiple applications-backup, security, and AI-on the same underlying infrastructure.

"The biggest investment in Cohesity is not the backup product," Murthy continued. "The biggest investment in Cohesity is the platform to store all data at massive scale and then build applications around it."

This architecture choice explains how they integrated NetBackup so quickly after their acquisition of Veritas. Instead of attempting to merge two separate platforms, they containerized NetBackup as an application running on the Cohesity data platform. Murthy described the timeline: "Developing NetBackup running on DataProtect in a matter of four months after the merger. It's unprecedented."

AI That Understands Data Sovereignty

The international perspective came through clearly during Mark Nutt's presentation on the company's global strategy. As SVP of International Sales, Nutt highlighted something that many AI vendors are struggling with-data sovereignty requirements, particularly in European markets.

"One of the things we're finding with European customers is they want that on-prem," Poonen noted. "Countries in Europe are saying they want a sovereign cloud. They want a sovereign answer. We're the only solution that'll have Gaia on-prem."

Statton detailed three deployment options for Gaia: 1) fully cloud-based, 2) hybrid (where GPU-intensive processing happens in the cloud but data stays on-premises), and 3) completely on-premises using NVIDIA infrastructure. The on-premises option, announced at GTC in partnership with NVIDIA, addresses regulatory concerns while maintaining AI capabilities.

"There's going to be some data that should never go out to the Internet," Statton explained. "Maybe some smaller customers don't want to deal with the headache of managing all that additional infrastructure and just want to deploy it all as a service. But it's the same code, you get the same results."

The Five-Step Cyber Resilience Framework

Beyond the AI capabilities, the briefing revealed how Cohesity is positioning itself in the cybersecurity market with what they call the Five-Step Cyber Resilience Framework. Murthy broke down the approach:

Steps 1-2 (Core Edition): Protect all data and ensure it's always recoverable. This includes the zero-trust, immutable storage capabilities that form the foundation.

Steps 3-5 (Enterprise Edition): Detect anomalies, practice recovery, and monitor risks. This is where the AI capabilities really shine.

"You want to constantly look for threats in the data," Murthy explained. "If a virus comes in and skips the first level defense, you want to catch it in the backups. You want to constantly look for threats in the data."

The retrospective threat hunting capability stands out as genuinely innovative. "CrowdStrike, endpoint security-all those guys cannot do it. They can't go back and test yesterday's data. We can do it because we have the backups from yesterday. You can actually go back and search."

Clean Room Recovery: Beyond Traditional Disaster Recovery

The technical discussion around cyber recovery revealed another differentiator. Traditional backup vendors focus on data restoration, but Cohesity is building what they call "clean application recovery"-a combination of clean configuration, clean data, and clean room testing.

"Previously, backup companies are only interested in the data. But data is not enough to bring the application up," Murthy explained. "You need the configuration, you need the infrastructure, you need testing for everything."

The approach addresses a fundamental problem with traditional cyber recovery: simply restoring yesterday's backup when you hit a cyber attack often means restoring the malware along with the data. The clean room approach involves automated malware scanning, configuration validation, and isolated testing before declaring applications ready for production.

Market Position and Competitive Dynamics

The international perspective reveals how dramatically the acquisition changed Cohesity's competitive position. Before the deal, Cohesity was 75% North America focused. The combined company is now split 50/50 between North America and international markets.

"More than half our sellers are based in international," Nutt noted. "We're going to countries and expanding our business at the same time as I see competitors shutting their offices down and choosing to go through distribution or channel-only models in those markets."

A former member of the Commvault team who had just started at Cohesity four days earlier offered candid commentary on the competitive dynamics: "I hated Cohesity because Commvault would lose to Cohesity. It was tough to win against Veritas because Veritas was the incumbent and had a lot of 20-year history. People had built businesses around Veritas."

His perspective on why he joined post-acquisition was telling: "When I saw the Cohesity and Veritas blurbs of the acquisition, never does two plus seven equal one. You had the number two installed vendor in Veritas, you had the number seven market share in Cohesity. It's now the number one." And he has always enjoyed working for the number one company-having worked for EMC and Dell/EMC for nearly 30 years. "And this acquisition really takes the best of both worlds, at least for me."

Looking Forward: The IPO Timeline and Industry Implications

The briefing concluded with Poonen's frank discussion about taking the combined company public. "We're just waiting for the right time. In the meantime, every quarter that we integrate and get our customers happy is a key advantage."

The strategy makes sense. Rather than rushing to market as the #7 player, they've created the #1 platform with international scale, AI capabilities, and a clear path to cyber resilience that competitors will struggle to match.

"When the time is right, you need enough digestion time of the new company," Poonen explained. "You have to have four to six quarters of performance of how this is going."

What emerged from this IT Press Tour briefing wasn't just another acquisition success story. It was a technical blueprint for how AI can transform enterprise data protection from a cost center into a competitive advantage. The fact that they're already delivering measurable results-40% reduction in support ticket resolution times, multi-million dollar international deals for Gaia-suggests this isn't just vision, but execution.

For IT teams evaluating data protection strategies, the message is clear: the backup and recovery market has evolved beyond traditional disaster recovery. The question isn't whether your data is protected, but whether you're extracting intelligence from it. And in that race, Cohesity's combination of platform architecture, AI capabilities, and global scale puts them in a position that could prove difficult for competitors to match. Only time will tell.

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