‘Remember, I’ve been a part of Veeam in the past through [its] previous acquisition [of Kasten]. So when Veeam reached out, we knew the company, we knew the culture, we knew how we fit in. Internally, we’ve told the team this is a milestone for us on the journey for what we care about,’ new Veeam CTO Niraj Tolia tells CRN.

Data protection software developer Veeam Software Wednesday said it has acquired a data management and protection startup and, in the process, brought back a previous employee to become its new CTO.

Veeam acquired Alcion, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of AI-based technology combining data protection and security as a single integrated offering. The two companies have had a long relationship, with Veeam an investor in Alcion’s seed funding as well as the lead investor in Alcion’s $21 million Series A funding round, which closed last fall.

Furthermore, Alcion’s two co-founders, CEO Niraj Tolia and CTO Vaibhav Karma, also co-founded Kasten, which developed Kubernetes-native container backup and data protection technologies. Kasten, in turn, was acquired by Veeam, one of the original pioneers in the protection of cloud and virtual machine data, in 2020.

[Related: Alcion Exits Stealth As ‘Modern AI-Driven Company’ Focused On Data Protection, Security, CEO Says]

Veeam declined to discuss the financial details of the acquisition, including whether Alcion had become cash-flow-positive. Tolia told CRN that the company was in growth mode and that it already has customers and MSP partners.

With the acquisition, Tolia returns to Veeam as the company’s new CTO. The company has had an interim CTO since the January departure of Danny Allen.

While Veeam and Alcion are focused on data protection, the two companies’ technologies complement each other, said Brandt Urban, senior vice president of worldwide cloud sales at Seattle-based Veeam.

Veeam has had great momentum with its Veeam Data Cloud, which provides data resilience for Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads, and Alcion will only accelerate that momentum, Urban told CRN.

“There’s been overwhelming response from customers that they want Veeam capabilities delivered as a service,” he said. “And I think Alcion brings a ton of cloud expertise in cloud-native application design and using that to accelerate our innovation is going to be fantastic. I’m really excited about the Alcion team bringing their design language and their automation capabilities to take us to that next tier with Veeam Data Cloud and being able to add new capabilities to our existing offerings and more quickly get new applications into Veeam Data Cloud.”

Being acquired by Veeam was a great opportunity for Alcion, Tolia said.

“Remember, I’ve been a part of Veeam in the past through a previous acquisition,” he said. “So when Veeam reached out, we knew the company, we knew the culture, we knew how we fit in. Internally, we’ve told the team this is a milestone for us on the journey for what we care about. The previous two products I built in different companies, including things I did 10-plus years ago, are still shipping. I believe in building lasting businesses and technology.”

Veeam is where Tolia said he plans to stay.

“I’m a pragmatic person,” he said. “I don’t have IPO fever. I don’t have acquisition fever. This is about staying for the things I care about, data protection. I’ve worked on it since my grad school days. I care about the impact we make on customers. I care about the problems I can solve for people. And this was a very clear path to say, ‘How do we increase our impact on our customers by orders of magnitude in a very quick manner?’”

The acquisition of Alcion is a great move for Veeam and shows just how much the company has matured under CEO Anand Eswaran, said Tom May, CEO of Different Dev, a professional services company focused exclusively on Veeam environments.

“I know that Veeam is setting its sights on kind of that next level, and I know a lot of it is AI-based,” May told CRN.

In addition to the technology Veeam gets with Alcion, it also gets a good CTO with a startup mentality, May said.

“[Tolia is] bringing his team with him, and he’s already brought two big products to market,” he said. “This will be good. Alcion has a focus on AI, and I know Veeam is really focusing on AI. When we were at this year’s VeeamON conference, they were talking about and demoing AI in the console and different things. Well, now they’re strategically picking up a company that I’m not too familiar with but which has backup tech and which can bring AI intelligence into the Veeam Suite.”