Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh (Part 1)

We’ve covered Actifio when it was a much smaller company. Now approaching sustainable profitability and an IPO, the company has scaled heights. Here, we look at the trends in its space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Actifio. We have covered you before. We have the beginning story. It’s been awhile since we talked. Let’s do some level-setting first.

Ash Ashutosh: Actifio is a software company that enables global enterprises to leverage their data as a strategic asset. Data is the new infrastructure that allows them to develop applications faster, run machine learning analytics faster, and leverage public cloud platforms faster. We allow enterprises to really focus on one of their biggest and most strategic assets.

Data is the new oil. We’ve been digging that oil out for the last 10 years and making it a very valuable asset for some of the largest global enterprises today. We support over 3,600 global enterprises in 38 countries now and pretty much 60% of the Fortune 100 are using Actifio. 

Sramana Mitra: How do you position? What does the ecosystem map look like at this point? Who are the players? Who’s doing what?

Ash Ashutosh: Let’s start with who benefits the most. The target market is the users who have a billion in revenue or more. These are people who have business-critical applications like databases.

Most importantly, it’s for people where data is very important for them either to move their business forward or to protect their business. It’s a classic case of large enterprises who are heavily undertaking digital transformation with data at the heart of all of this activity.

If you start with that, you can start working backwards into the ecosystem. The ecosystem begins with infrastructure people. These are people who provide infrastructure to either store this data, use this data like compute companies, or provide overall platform like cloud companies.

I’ve got my data but the surrounding data is a series of other players around cloud security and platforms. Then there are tools that consume this data like DevOps tools and machine learning tools. This morning, I was meeting with a company who was in the business of creating a marketplace. We’re focused on creating something that truly makes it very simple for people who are consuming the data.

At the same time, it’s also managed by operations people. These are people across the enterprise who are called Chief Data Officers. These are people in the bowels of the organization ensuring that data is captured and protected, and more importantly, available when required. If you look around you, the amount of data we consume and create is ridiculous. 

Sramana Mitra: Is the buyer enterprise IT then?

Ash Ashutosh: The buyer is typically the CIO who says, “I am now going to be data-driven, which means I need to make sure that data is available to people who are consuming it to make decisions faster.

The actual user is the operations person who will deploy the software so that it can scour the entire enterprise, start vacuuming data from different places, and create a copy data lake. Then give each of those consumers access to those data anywhere. The ability for these operations team to make this data available consistently but more importantly, instantly. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh
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