Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 3,600 customers. If you think about the industry trend, you have modernized the use of data in enterprises quite significantly. What is the adoption level in your target market of your kind of technology? Is it early adopters? Is it early majority?

Ash Ashutosh: We’re probably getting to the early mainstream phase. We’re well past early adopters. People understand now. I look at the five of the top 20 global energy companies, five of the top 10 insurance companies, and six of the largest banks.

People know they need access to data. People may not know there is Actifio out there that can help them. That is the challenge for us, which is why we did something interesting about 12 months ago that I can talk about.

Sramana Mitra: In that adoption process, what use case has been the biggest driver?

Ash Ashutosh: That’s a great question. Over 73% is around people using it for DevOps, hybrid cloud, or machine learning. Machine learning is pretty early. 73% is about people consuming data. Only 27% is the traditional backup who are just capturing data. We do a phenomenal job of being a backup and DR company. We see that as selling an insurance policy.

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that the most important partner for you is ServiceNow?

Ash Ashutosh: ServiceNow is a customer and kind of a partner. We have four partners. We have established a partnership with IBM with their data and AI teams. Those teams are all about data. It is Watsons which consumes data.

There is the entire cloud platform that allows people to spin up other resources to allow them to get their data to the cloud and do whatever they need to do. IBM is big partner of ours. They OEM our software. They call it IBM Infosphere. That business has run dramatically even though it just kicked off in the first half of last year. It’s gone very well.

The need for data and the awareness of what you can do with data is very evident. The fact that there is Actifio that can help to solve that problem is not that well-known, which is why somebody like IBM has a much bigger reach.

Sramana Mitra: I brought up ServiceNow in response to your use case answer on DevOps. They’re quite big on IT and operations. 

Ash Ashutosh: Not big, but a lot of our customers use ServiceNow and they integrate our software into ServiceNow as part of the workflow. We are available in the ServiceNow marketplace but we don’t have a formal relationship like we do with IBM.

We have a similar relationship with Google Cloud. We have our SaaS offering that’s available on Google Cloud. If you are trying to go to Google Cloud, this is the only software that not only allows you to consume Google services like backup and DR, but you can also manage the data and make it available for TensorFlow to run analytics on. That is a big partnership for us.

The third partnership is with Dell EMC for on-premise appliances. For people who are trying to use DevOps, we sell them DevOps appliances, so you can have your own developer cloud. There’s an appliance that drops on your doorstep. Suddenly, all developers have access to data they need. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh
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