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.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Dell’s an OEM relationship?

Ash Ashutosh: It’s a reseller/selling partner relationship. Their sellers can sell it and they get paid for it. They don’t rebrand the Actifio software. They rebrand the whole product.

The last partnership is on the systems integrator side with TCS. Because it’s all about data and transformation, we needed to find a partner who spends an enormous amount of time with the kinds of customers we deal with. It has contributed to about 20% of our revenue.

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.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One of the things I’m hearing in your description is that there is the infrastructure layer of making this data available. Then there is an application layer to make use of that data. Is that a correct observation?

Ash Ashutosh: Yes. In fact, there are three layers. One is the data virtualization layer, which is where we capture it and tag it. Then there is data mobility. You have to move it around seamlessly. It was very tough when the cloud platforms came around.

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.

PaaS: How PaaS Impacts the Stock Prices of SaaS Companies

I assume you have been reading my commentary on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). 

To recap, in SaaS Companies: You Have An Unprecedented Opportunity, I started highlighting the massive momentum in Cloud Stocks exactly two years back.

In Cloud Stocks: SaaS Companies NEED PaaS Strategy and Cloud Stocks: Calling ALL PaaS Leaders, I pointed out how PaaS is a key strategic tool in building leverage for SaaS companies.

And at the end of 2019, I published Cloud Stocks: Top 20 for 2020 with a summary of which SaaS companies are succeeding on the basis of a strong PaaS strategy. Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM), ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) – all featured on this list.

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Portshift CEO Ran Ilany (Part 2)

Ran Ilany: The second thing that we’re doing is authenticating the communication of those workloads. That is to say, the actual identity of the workload is injected into the traffic stream so that every connection would be, first and foremost, authenticated and would then be authorized.

The whole notion here is moving from IP port and protocol to workload identity that can be authenticated at runtime. This is what we call the runtime protection.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Portshift CEO Ran Ilany (Part 1)

This interview puts the spotlight on a highly specialized area of cyber security, identity-based workload protection.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Portshift.