Cohesity-Veritas Merger, F5 App World Recap, and Security Vendors in the AI Age

In this episode of This Week in Tech, I’m joined by Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research and member of theCUBE Collective community for a quick discussion about thoughts on the Cohesity-Veritas merger, a recap from the F5 App World event, and thoughts on the evolution of security vendors in the AI age.

Watch the full episode here or stream it wherever you get your podcasts:

Here’s a recap of the episode highlights.

The Cohesity-Veritas Merger: The Pros, the Cons and the Challenges Ahead

In a move that is less of a merger and more of a strategic alignment of individual strengths to provide more comprehensive solutions, the Cohesity-Veritas merger was the highlight of many conversations since it was announced.

This merger consolidates two key players in the data protection industry, which today is a highly fragmented one. We kicked off our conversation reviewing some pros and cons that Zeus covered in an article published on SiliconANGLE. The upside for Cohesity and Veritas here include:

• The combined companies can leverage Veritas’s global customer base with Cohesity’s largely North American-based but much bigger brand presence for increased customer acquisition.
• This big customer base also means a large data set that can be used for AI, which is what every vendor seeks today. This could easily propel Cohesity’s AI efforts moving forward.
• Cohesity and Veritas used to compete against one another; this merger means reduced customer acquisition costs.
• The profitability Veritas brings to the merger will likely spur greater innovation, expansion, and an increased R&D focus/spend.

This move is a strategic one, nicely combining the tech expertise of Cohesity in the modern data and AI platform market with Veritas’s attractive installed customer base and strong IP portfolio. Our analysis of ITDM spending data from ETR indicates that Veritas has struggled since pre-pandemic times, and that likely played a role here as well.

Today, the ‘let’s go it alone’ mindset is rapidly evolving into a ‘stronger together’ strategy as vendors work to fund the tech advancements needed to serve and retain customers and grow and scale. We are firm believers that partnerships and strategic alliances are what are needed to compete most effectively in a market that is crowded, challenging, and quickly evolving.

We also discussed some potential downsides to this merger, including:

• We see some very real challenges ahead with product redundancy and integration, which is not unusual in these situations.
• Any confusion or frustration for customers can present an opportunity for competitors to woo customers away. Cohesity and Veritas need to solve redundancy and integration issues — and quickly.
• The market might look at this as an opportunity to capitalize on customer confusion and the integration/redundancy challenges and try and steal customers. Veritas was once the “big dog” in data recovery and backup” but other vendors are catching up. Product redundancy and integration challenges, if not quickly addressed, could lead customers to other vendors who would be happy to have them.
• Debt management is a concern, with high interest rates and how they’ll service this debt key questions that the market will be watching.
• Customer conversion in a competitive market – there are no guarantees here, so delivering the absolute best in customer service and customer experiences will be paramount.

Like other analysts in the market, we’ll be watching to see how the Cohesity Veritas merger plays out. The bright spot here is that Sanjay Poonen is at the helm, and his history on the acquisition front is a testament to his capabilities.

F5 App World 2024  Recap

Our conversation recapped F5’s AppWorld 2024, an application security and delivery conference, took place in San Jose on February 6-8. As expected, AI was involved in pretty much every conversation and presentation.

F5 announced the F5 AI Data Fabric, a new data platform designed to deliver on the promise of AI, putting AI to work to deliver better app and API protection more quickly and more easily for users.

The F5 AI Data Fabric can help adapt and respond to threats more quickly, powered by generative AI, which will improve the user experience. F5 will be introducing an AI assistant later in 2024 that will give customers an intelligent partner. The NLP interface will allow users to ask questions about their data and generate dashboards in real-time, getting assists when it comes to implementing policies or even generating product configurations. F5 says that this tool will act as an embedded customer support manager, allowing customers to ask questions and get recommendations based on the collective knowledge available to F5. Sample questions might include things like:

“How many attacks did my infrastructure experience last week?”

“How many of those were SQL injection attacks?”

“Where are they coming from?”

“How do I configure bot protection for my new app?”

F5 also introduced new API and app security software tools designed to reduce the complexity of protecting and powering apps and APIs that fuel today’s digital landscape and making the process of managing tech infrastructure more efficient and providing better, faster, easier detection.

F5’s API code testing and telemetry analysis is coming to F5 Distributed Cloud Services, which F5 claims is the most comprehensive and AI-ready API security solution.

The company also announced that it is making AI pervasive across its entire solution portfolio with intelligent capabilities designed to protect against sophisticated AI-powered threats, making it easier to secure and manage multi-cloud app environments.

Zeus walked us through some highlights of his presentation at the F5 Investor Event, including the details about the unique structure of the company and why the integration of AI across the platform is significant as it puts F5 in a fairly unique situation.

In the final part of this episode of This Week in Tech, we touched on vendor performance in the security sector, the rise in cyber threats, and how the race to embrace and integrate AI into business operations is affecting both vendors and their customers. Security will be fun to watch, and we’ll be right there in the midst of it.