Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh (Part 5)

Ash Ashutosh: There’s more on the realty consumer side. This is more around what you do on your financial day-to-day mortgages but still in conjunction with the bank that I talked about. One mission was to make sure the customer of an enterprise had a good experience. The other one is to serve applications for the customers.

One is about a better experience if you’re working with me as a bank. The other one helps you do a better job of what you’re already doing. There’re so many silos of data that we could do a phenomenal job of as an entrepreneur to go solve this problem.

Sramana Mitra: Let me synthesize a little bit of what I’m sensing. Using your infrastructure in the back end, let’s say an entrepreneur is familiar with the domain of insurance. They could build a product that caters to all your insurance customers and be selling into those customers a particular solution.

Ash Ashutosh: There are two companies I could build. I could build applications for all the insurance companies for doing a better job of serving their customers. The other one is a solution for the customers to do a better job of leveraging all the insurance that they have and finding better tools.

These days, you have companies selling mattresses going public. My point is, there are much more complex things that we could spend our time on if only we had access to information.

You’re touching multiple companies like insurance or healthcare companies. It is about you. The locus is different. The digital footprint each of us leaves is so transparent and so big. It is scary what you can help people with. 

Sramana Mitra: That begs the question, would you be doing a PaaS strategy at some point that invites developers to build applications on your platform that you then open up in an app marketplace?

Ash Ashutosh: We would be enablers. We actually don’t own the data. We facilitate enterprises to gather up all the data. Let’s say the local government goes to Actifio to provide an open source data platform instead of going to 50 websites. That’s an example of where we could provide a platform.

We are not the producers of data. We talked about data everywhere. We talked about consumption everywhere.

One of the interesting parts is around security. Most people think of networks and perimeters. There’s a whole different opportunity around security when it comes to data being available. Our job is relatively easy because we do B2B. If a layman is involved, the approach would be different.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Great conversation. Where are you in terms of revenues right now?

Ash Ashutosh: We focus on two things: get to consistent growth levels, and get to profitability. Beginning last year, we bobbed in and out of profitability every other quarter.

The target is to get back to being completely profitable starting next year. At the same time, we target about 36% growth. Our average selling price is about $180,000, maybe double that for our partners. Our partners are much better at selling bigger deals. 70% of our sales are expansions. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh
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