‘The lack of a unified platform across the entire data estate is the primary reason for that 90 percent failure rate of AI projects. What we’re trying to do with this acquisition is launch the industry’s first solution which will unify data security and data resilience across the entire data estate, primary and backup data and structured and unstructured data. This is the key and the core to accelerating safe AI at scale. That is at the heart of what Veeam is doing,’ says Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran.
Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran told CRN his company’s blockbuster $1.72 billion acquisition of AI data cybersecurity upstart Securiti is set to provide a unified platform across the entire data estate that takes aim directly at the 90 percent failure rate of AI projects.
“The lack of a unified platform across the entire data estate is the primary reason for that 90 percent failure rate of AI projects,” Eswaran said. “What we’re trying to do with this acquisition is launch the industry’s first solution which will unify data security and data resilience across the entire data estate, primary and backup data and structured and unstructured data. This is the key and the core to accelerating safe AI at scale. That is at the heart of what Veeam is doing.”
The acquisition will create a comprehensive platform integrating data security posture management (DSPM), data resilience, AI trust, and enterprise search.
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Securiti’s DPSM offering spans privacy, governance, access, and AI trust across hybrid, multi-cloud, and SaaS platforms. The company claims its built-in and extensible agentic AI framework automates the key functions for data intelligence, data security, and controls, while its Gencore AI module enables safe enterprise AI search.
“Gencore comes integrated deeply with the same identity and permissioning models, which they have for the rest of the stack, which just is built in,” Eswaran said. “It’s amazing. Essentially, it allows Veeam to then unify data security poster management or DSPM with resilience, AI, trust and enterprise search all into one data command center, creating one knowledge graph across the whole thing. And this is the core. It allows Veeam to extend it to AI pipes. This is how we flip that 90 percent failure rate to a 90 percent success rate for AI projects.”
Securiti’s unified knowledge graph across the entire data estate effectively provides data governance based on the right permissions and entitlements, Eswaran said. “When you do that, you get to an even more mature agentic AI-based data protection solution, or resilient solutions across humans and agents,” he said.
That opens the door for Veeam to “further fine tune agentic AI-based dynamic policies,” constantly adapting to live data created in a dynamic agentic AI world, Eswaran said.
“If bad things were to happen, it’s not now just recovering data,” he said. “It allows Veeam to recover and roll back AI surgically to the right place.”
Veeam said it will continue to offer Securiti’s Data Command Center alongside its existing product family and will introduce new capabilities after the deal closes.
Securiti founder and CEO Rehan Jalil – a serial entrepreneur who founded the company in 2019 – will join Veeam as president of security and AI when the deal is completed.
The deal is expected to close in early December. Veeam anticipates the acquisition will accelerate growth, with the company projected to reach $2 billion in annual recurring revenue this year not including the Securiti revenue.
Steven Burke contributed to this article.
What’s going on with the acquisition of Securiti?
Let me give you my sense of what this is all about. We are acquiring Securiti AI for $1.72 billion. You know Veeam very well: number one market share, leader in data resilience and ransomware recovery. These days, AI, GPU, and inference deals get all the limelight, all the highlights. Look at the $14.2 billion deal between CoreWeave and Meta, or $100 billion between OpenAI and everybody else.
But the thing is this, that’s great for compute and capacity. But there is no enterprise AI without data security on one side, and if bad things happen, data resilience on the other side. These two are the key things we hear from our customers all the time. They have to work with multiple companies, multiple tools across data security and data resilience, and then differently for primary data versus backup data. The lack of a unified platform across the entire data estate is the primary reason for that 90 percent failure rate of AI projects.
Pictured: Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran, left, with Securiti Founder and CEO Rehan Jalil.
What is Veeam doing with the Securiti acquisition?
What we’re trying to do with this acquisition is launch the industry’s first solution which will unify data security and data resilience across the entire data estate, primary and backup data and structured and unstructured data. This is the key and the core to accelerating safe AI at scale. That is at the heart of what Veeam is doing.
When looking at data security, you really need to understand your data across primary, secondary, structured, unstructured. What Securiti does is creates a unified knowledge graph across the entire data estate, which is very powerful. Why? Because when you get to that, it allows you to then govern it. It allows you to make sure that access is safe based on the right permissions, based on the right entitlements.
When you do that, you get to an even more mature agentic AI-based data protection solution, or resilient solutions across humans and agents. This allows Veeam to further fine tune agentic AI-based dynamic policies, constantly adapting to what’s happening on the live data. And if bad things were to happen, it’s not now just recovering data. It allows Veeam to recover and roll back AI surgically to the right place.
If models drift, if models get poisoned, it allows Veeam to surgically roll them back to the right place. And when we do all of these, it also then allows Veeam to be a facilitator of data for AI projects. That’s the cool thing, the cherry on top.
Securiti has this product called Gencore, which is really roughly the equivalent of Glean for enterprise search, but better, because Gencore comes integrated deeply with the same identity and permissioning models which they have for the rest of the stack, which just is built in. It’s amazing. Essentially, it allows Veeam to then unify data security poster management or DSPM with resilience, AI, trust and enterprise search all into one data command center, creating one knowledge graph across the whole thing. And this is the core. It allows Veeam to extend it to AI pipes. This is how we flip that 90 percent failure rate to a 90 percent success rate for AI projects. That’s broadly where we’re going and why we’re doing it.
Talk a little about DSPM.
Data security posture management. Securiti is a category leader of data security posture management, which is all the things I talked about. This is where you get to real-time classification and understanding the lineage of data. This is a huge category. There are few companies which matter in DSPM. One is Securiti. The others are Sierra AI and BigID. But if you go to any analyst report, you’ll see that Securiti is the outsized category leader for data security and DSPM.
And what’s the situation between Securiti and Glean?
One element of Securiti’s product is that it allows you to be a facilitator of trusted data now for enterprise search. There may be one other company which does enterprise search meaningfully. It’s Glean. With Securiti AI, we are actually able to do it better than Glean because it comes on a foundation of deeply integrated permissioning, models, entitlements, identity, all of that is built in. And so is DSPM, and this is why it’s unifying DSPM resilience, which Veeam stands for, and enterprise search. It brings it all together as the key way to unlock safe AI for every company on the planet.
Earlier this month, NetApp introduced its AIDE, or AI Data Environment, as a way to manage and protect data across on-prem and multi-cloud environments. How does what Veeam is doing with Securiti differ?
There’s plenty of companies who do similar things. I’m not deeply into what NetApp does. But at the core of this technology, you have security companies who do some aspect of DSPM, and you have data resilience companies who do some smaller aspect of DSPM. Nobody does it across the entire data estate. Nobody does it across primary and backup data. The first thing we’re going to do is bring all of these together, DSPM with resilience, so it’s a unified data graph across primary and backup data. The second thing is to extend it into the governed AI pipe in a much better way. We can understand not the just the relationship amongst different data elements, we can see which data is being tagged by which LLM used to train what kinds of data, and that degree of detail allows us to protect those LLMs and protect those prompts in a much better way. This will allow us to then make sure if things go bad, we not just recover your data, but roll back your AI to the safest place possible, which is going to be a very, very key thing for every company going forward. Nobody manages data at that granularity, across primary and secondary, like Veeam and Securiti together.
What is Veeam’s integration plan for Securiti? Will there be two separate products or a single platform?
We’ll dive deep into integrations once we close. We expect to close in early December. So as part of the regulatory process, we don’t work together in any way during the close, until the filings are done and the regulatory approvals are here. But at the heart of it the whole thesis here is that all of the above—data security and DSPM—are super critical. That focus doesn’t change for Securiti. If anything, we will invest even more and accelerate their roadmaps. Veeam’s focus on data resilience doesn’t change. We’ve talked about data resilience being this aggregation of backup, recovery, portability, security, and intelligence, but the real magic is going to be what I talked about when we started this call, which is bringing the two together into a unified platform, with one knowledge graph across the live data, which is what DSPM historically has done, and backup data, which is what Veeam has done. That one platform is sort of the ‘One Ring to rule them all.’ The one platform to visually bring all of these together is going to be the magic when we close and when we get into what the integrated roadmap looks like.
Has Veeam ever partnered with Securiti?
We have not. We were exploring a partnership which turned into something much bigger, because we saw the promise for our customers.
How did you first learn about Securiti?
It was all customer-driven. When customers today use multiple companies and products for different aspects of what needs to be done, and when AI projects, which everyone invested deeply into, start failing, the realization in conversations with our customers was that a trusted data fabric across primary and secondary data was needed to connect to the governed AI pipelines. Bringing them all together is super key. When we went down that path, we said, ‘All right, who are the companies who do it?’ Well, there’s probably two or three companies who do that really well, handling the raw materials of data, security, privacy, and compliance. And that process led us to seeing how we can structure a partnership with Securiti, which pretty rapidly turned the conversation into, ‘You know what? This is IP which businesses will want from one company.’ And that process led us from exploring a partnership to an acquisition.”
Veeam plans to spend $1.725 billion to acquire Securiti. Why acquire it when you could just partner with it and still integrate the technology with yours?
We are pretty convicted that companies are going to have want to work with one vendor, with first party IP across this unified story. When you partner, you are always going to be lagging behind on driving the innovation agenda. The partner is going to have its own path, and you’re not going to get the degree of innovation velocity needed to push the ability to prioritize a singular roadmap across our two product suites to unify it. I mean, those things just don’t happen. You explore a partnership when there is some incremental value you can bring from a different product to your customers. You make it an acquisition, and you combine the companies into one platform which is going to be super critical for customer value.
Was Securiti a profitable company?
I don’t think we have shared those details. What I would tell you is, Securiti is the category leader for data security posture management. They haven’t shared, and we have not yet shared, any public info on the financials. But at the same time, Veeam is going to finish this year, without looking at Securiti’s numbers, reaching $2 billion in ARR (annual recurring revenue). We’re gonna finish this year at greater than 25 percent operating margin. We are growing in the high teens. I feel Veeam has got the best balance of growth, profitability, scale. We’re in 150-plus countries with 550,000-plus customers and 34,000-plus partners. We are in the sweet spot, and Securiti will add to it. It will accrue meaningfully and serve as a growth accelerator for us.
Does Securiti have a channel program, or did they work direct?
Securiti is in very early stages. It’s largely an engineering-focused company with customer pull versus a massive go-to-market presence and stuff like that. But this is where basically our partners will get the best of both worlds. As soon as we close, we will make sure that first of all, Securiti’s products will be made available to all our partners. Partners are the most important part of our go-to-market strategy and distribution, and that doesn’t change. And second, as we start to unify, this will be a huge bonus for every single Veeam partner because they get to move every one of their customers to accelerating their AI.
Anything else that we should know about Veeam or its acquisition of Securiti?
What excites me is when companies have bought other DSPM companies, either they’ve bought them from a security standpoint and focus them only on primary data, or they bought them from a data resilience standpoint and only focus them on backup data. Those companies have been so small that very early stage, with maybe a million dollars in ARR. This is where life completely changes. Veeam has basically unified primary and backup. So we have just widened the aperture and changed the frame of how we basically accelerate safe AI for our customers. That’s the big thing here. It’s a category of our own. Now we don’t exist in any other category. We’re creating our own.
By the way, are you a photographer? You used the phrases ‘widen the aperture’ and ‘focus the frame’ from photography.
I try to steal relevant phrases from every walk of life. I think I’m a huge student of history. Usually I go to history lessons for everything I do. But sometimes photography works as well.
