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Veritas veteran becomes new big cheese at Symantec spin-off

The future is cloudy...

Greg Hughes has been hired as head honcho at the private equity-owned storage spin-off from Symantec, Veritas.

Hughes is a Veritas veteran, having been EVP for global services from October 2003 to mid-2005, then president for global services when Symantec bought Veritas in 2005, president from 2008 onwards, president for the Enterprise Product Group from 2009 to mid-2010, when he was responsible for all Veritas products. Then he left and became an operating partner at Silver Lake and took up some board-level positions.

One of them was at Silver Lake-owned Serena Software, which sold application delivery, release and IT service management software to Global 2000 businesses. He was made CEO of this outfit in 2013 until 2016, during which time Silver Lake sold it to HGGC, another private equity biz, and Doug Troxel in April 2014. In May 2016, Micro Focus bought Serena for $540m.

With all this on his CV, you can see why the Carlyle Group, which owns Veritas, would be interested enough to interview Hughes. Please do with Veritas, they might have said, what you did with Serena Software, and make us meeellions of dollars.

Bill Krause, chairman of the board for Veritas, said: "Greg has a proven track record of strategic and operational success in enterprise software, knows the company well from his previous work with Veritas and Symantec, and understands the data management demands and challenges facing Veritas's large customer base around the world."

Yes, sure, but he is a Veritas vet, and not familiar with the Veeams and Rubriks, Cohesities, DatosIOs and other backup/data management upstarts of this world.

You can take the Veritas out of Symantec. And you did...

Former CEO Bill Coleman, who took Veritas out of Symantec in a troubled process, has been made a Veritas board member and advisor, and an operating partner at the Carlyle Group.

He said: "I believe that Greg is the ideal leader to transition Veritas to the next phase of its evolution. This planned succession ensures a seamless transition for the company and its customers, employees and partners."

Veritas says Coleman successfully steered strategy as a privately held company and oversaw the diligence process around its separation from Symantec in 2015. We recall this involved a last-minute $600m price cut. Some diligence.

He then led a team of more than 7,000 employees around the world as Veritas overhauled its portfolio, and developed a cloud platform strategy. ®

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