Veritas Technologies LLC, which has gone through a 12-year roller coaster ride as a public company, subsidiary of Symantec Corp., a spinoff and now a private company again, is changing its top leadership.

The company today said Greg Hughes (pictured) will become chief executive, replacing Bill Coleman, who will remain on the company’s board and take on an operational role at parent company The Carlyle Group.

Hughes was previously CEO of enterprise application lifecycle management firm Serena Software Inc., which he sold to Micro Focus International plc two years ago. He earlier worked at Veritas as executive vice president of global services, later shifting to Symantec Corp. when that company acquired Veritas in 2005. At Symantec he was responsible for all products of the Veritas subsidiary.

Veritas said the transition was “part of a planned succession strategy to lead the next phase of the company’s evolution,” although Coleman made no mention of such plans when he was interviewed in November by Wikibon analysts Stu Miniman and David Vellante on theCUBE (below), SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. Veritas did not make either executive available to comment.

History would indicate Coleman didn’t plan to stay far beyond orchestrating a turnaround that began two years ago. He co-founded enterprise application and service infrastructure vendor BEA Systems Inc. in 1995 and grew it to nearly 80 offices worldwide before selling to Oracle Corp. for $8.5 billion in 2008. Before joining Veritas in 2016, he spent six years as a full-time partner at the venture capital firm of Alsop Louie Partners.

At Veritas, Coleman engineered a turnaround from a legacy business that consisted primarily of on-premises backup and recovery to a multi-cloud data management and software-defined storage franchise. “This company now has a startup, win-in-the-marketplace, customer-first culture,” he told theCUBE.

Veritas grew rapidly through the latter 1990s, fueled by acquisitions and the dot-com boom. At its peak, it had annual revenues of $2.6 billion when Symantec bought it for $13.5 billion. However, Symantec struggled to find synergies with its security business, eventually breaking itself into two pieces and then selling the Veritas information management business the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, for $8 billion.

Becoming a private company was a blessing for Veritas, given the magnitude of the turnaround that was needed, Coleman said on theCUBE. “We’re switching from mostly license revenue to subscription. In a public company, that’s an, ‘Oh, our revenue’s going to go down for a while,’” he said. “I don’t think I could do this as other than a private company.”

Veritas said Hughes will continue to focus on getting and keeping customers and innovating as rapidly as possible. “Greg knows the company well from his previous work with Veritas and Symantec and understands the data management challenges facing Veritas’ large customer base around the world,” Bill Krause, Veritas’ chairman of the board, said in a prepared statement.

Added Coleman, “Greg is the ideal leader to transition Veritas to the next phase of its evolution.”

Image: Veritas