Actifio

Actifio

Type	Private
Industry	Information Technology, data backup, big data, business continuity, disaster recovery, data protection, data storage
Founded	2009
Headquarters	Waltham, Massachusetts
Key people	Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO
Website	http://actifio.com/

Actifio is a privately held information technology firm headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.^[1] The company specializes in copy data virtualization. Its products make information technology infrastructure more efficient and cost effective by reducing unnecessary duplication of data.^[2]

History

In July 2009, Ash Ashutosh founded Actifio in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company started with just four employees.^[3] Since launching its first product in the fall of 2011,^[4] Actifio has expanded rapidly and has been described as history’s fastest growing storage startup.^[5]

In 2012 Gartner recommended Actifio in their Cool Vendor report and said its products facilitated cloud-based and offsite start and computing without the need to build secondary data centers. That year sales increased about 700 percent over 2011. By then end of 2012, Actifio had achieved five consecutive quarters of 500% year-on-year growth. In the fourth quarter of 2012 alone, Actifio did 62 deals with new clients with an average value of $210,000.

Staffing increased from 50 in December 2011 to 120 in May 2012. As of May 2012, about a fourth of the company's revenue came from Europe.^[6][7]

In January 2013, Actifio had direct sales operations in 16 countries. Actifio increased is revenue 182 percent in 2013. Speaking of the companies growth Ashutosh said, "Twenty-two percent of our sales come from what would have gone to EMC. Fifteen percent of our sales came from Symantec. And in 50 percent of our sales, there was nobody else there. We have found a gaping hole in the market that is unaddressed by traditional storage guys."

As of 30 June 2014, Actifio had about 400 employees.

Funding

On July 21, 2010 Actifio announced that it had secured $8 million in series A funding. This round was led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. Jamie Goldstein, general partner at North Bridge said, “Actifio has all the ingredients for success including a hot market opportunity, technology superiority, and a stellar executive team that will allow Actifio to deliver on the promise of Data Management Virtualization.” ^[8]

On September 30, 2010 Actifio announced that it had closed on $16 million in series B funding. This round of funding was led by Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV) with participation by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. It brought Actifio's total venture capital funding to $24 million. Bob Hower, ATV's general partner, said, "Actifio is a breakout company that is changing the game for how data is protected and managed. The traction for its innovative data management virtualization solutions across a broad spectrum of customers has been very impressive." ^[9]

In 2011, Actifio received $33 million in Series C funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. This firm, headed by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, has also funded Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter. Actifio had just started looking for its next round of funding when Peter Levine, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, called to merely ask about Actifio's location. Actifio closed on funding nine days later. Levine said he did the deal because he believes Actifio will “dominate a large segment of the backup and storage space.” North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures also invested in this round of funding. After completing its Series C funding, Actifio had received a total of $57 million in venture capital.^[10][11][12]

During Actifio's $50 million Series D round, media reported that investors valued the company at $500 million.^[13] After completing its Series D funding the firm had received $108 million in venture capital.

On 23 March 2014, Actifio announced that it had raised another $100 million in series E funding from Tiger Global Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Technology Crossover Ventures that increased its implied valuation to $1.1 billion. This money came in the form of primary funding with no secondary liquidity for employees or earlier shareholders.^[14] Ashutosh said that $125 million could have been raised but that some money had been turned away. $75 million closed on 14 March and the rest on 7 April. After this round of funding, Actifio had raised $207.5 million in capital.^[15]

Initial public offering

Ashutosh said he wants to take his company public in order to build credibility with clients. He stated, "It’s absolutely a way to meet a market requirement — to be relevant, you need to be public.”

Clients

Actifio clients have included Time Warner Cable, Boston University Medical Campus, Navisite, the City of South Portland, Unilever, IBM, Netflix, and many other organizations^[16] As of October 2012, Actifio had about 180 clients and its deals averaged a value of about $250,000.^[17] By March 2013, Actifio had over 300 clients in 31 countries paying an average of $349,000 per three year contract. The data under Actifio management at this time was over 1 exabyte, with 14 petabytes of active application data, and 55 petabytes of physical storage capacity.^[18] As of July 2014, there were about 400 Actifio clients worldwide, including both large multinationals and cloud service providers.^[19]

TechValidate conducted a survey that determined 88% of Actifio’s customers use its copy data virtualization products for better data protection and availability; 59% for faster access to data for development, testing, and analytics; 24% to improve the cost effectiveness and efficiency of cloud-based computing.^[20]

Awards and recognition

In 2012, Gartner recognized Actifio as a "Cool Vendor." They said that clients should "“Include Actifio when seeking to lower the cost of data availability and protection while further leveraging existing investments in array and storage controller snapshot and replication.”

In the first quarter of 2013, Forbes magazine named Actifio one of the 50 most promising companies in America and the company received a "Product of the Year" award from Storage Magazine. On 1 May 2013, Actifio won "Deal of the Year" at the New England Venture Capital Association Awards.^[21] Actifio won a New England Innovation Award from the Smaller Business Association of New England the same month.^[22] In 2013, Gartner recognized Actifio in their Magic Quadrant report as a "Visionary."

On 29 April 2014, The Boston Business Journal placed Actifio on its list of 2014 Best Places to Work.^[23]

Copy data

Copy data consists of multiple copies of the same file. This data could come in the form of multiple copies of volumes, backups, test/dev, online copies for disaster recover, etc. In a study IDC found that about 75% of storage is consumed by copy data. Actifio conducts joint research with IDC to understand the copy data problem in depth.^[24] IDC estimated that businesses would spend roughly $44 billion on coping with copy data in 2013.

Copy data management

Actifio was one of the first firms to enter the copy data management (CDM) market.^[25] Gartner Group analyst Dave Russell wrote, “Companies keep 30 to 40 copies of their business data and managing those different copies is expensive and complicated. The reason they do it is because the data is used for different purposes: backing it up to satisfy regulators, letting the business recover from a fire or flood, testing and developing new applications, and analyzing the data to find meaningful business insights. Actifio introduced CDM – the idea of keeping one golden copy of the data and making it available to a company without needing to store a separate copy for each use.”

Products

Actifio's products work by dramatically reducing unnecessary duplication of application data while ensuring that it is still protected and easily accessible through its entire lifecycle. By virtualizing data management and storage Actifio's products can replace their client's siloed data protection and availability applications with a single purpose-built system. Actifio's products create a single "golden master" of production data and maintain changes to that master copy so that users running a simple, single window application can recover even large data sets in minutes.^[26][27]

Actifio claims its products can cut data management costs up to 90% and typically replace five to 13 separate pieces of software. The company touts ease of use as a key selling point and says that its products are a "pleasure to use" and are designed with "Apple-like simplicity."^[28] Pricing for Actifio products depends on the volume of data handled, with rates per-terabyte decreasing as volume increases.^[29] The company says that its clients get back about $15 in cost savings for every dollar spent on its products.^[30][31] TechValidate determined that Actifio's client's usually achieve 90% savings calculated on a total-cost-of-ownership basis.^[32]

Actifio Sky

Actifio Sky was announced in May 2014. Actifio Sky is a software-only data virtualization platform that can be deployed as a virtual appliance on platforms such as VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Actifio-powered clouds. Actifio Sky uses patented Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology that makes it easier to move data to a central site in order to improve security, reliability, and analytics. Actifio Sky captures production data and replaces siloed data management applications with a simple, application-centric, SLA-driven approach. It helps manage captured data by creating a single “golden master.” This data can be used to make numerous virtual copies for use anywhere desired. Actifio Sky is used for cloud-based deployments, inside data centers, and on remote office/branch office (ROBO) systems.^[33][34]

Actifio Resiliency Director

In July 2014, Actifio introduced Resiliency Director, an automated disaster recovery tool. With Resiliency Director, Actifio says "the disaster recovery process – from testing to actual execution - can be ... automated, the time spent on recovering large numbers of applications and virtual machines is collapsed from days to minutes." Sungard Availability Services, a disaster recovery firm, was able to recover hundreds of virtual machines in less than 20 minutes during a test of Resiliency Director. Actifio says that Resiliency Director is the "World's Fastest Cloud Business Continuity Solution."^[35]

Appliances

Actifio CDS

The Actifio CDS is a storage appliance that can scale to up to 2 petabytes of capacity. It is available in six standard configuration including most storage services, such as data lifecycle management, reduplication and backup replication, failover testing, and fallback automation. Options are available for Exchange, Sharepoint, and bare metal restoration.

Actifio 100T

The Actifio 100T is a storage appliance that can scale to up to 2 petabytes of capacity. It is available in six standard configurations including support for storage services such as data lifecycle management, reduplication and backup replication, failover testing, and fallback automation. Options are available for Exchange, Sharepoint, and bare metal recovery.^[36]

Actifio Gateway

The Actifio Gateway is an appliance with no native storage capacity that virtualizes capacity for various vendors into a single storage pool that can be scaled up to eight petabytes.

Leadership

Ash Ashutosh

Actifio was founded by Ash Ashutosh, who had previously served as chief technologist at HP's StorageWorks division, a position he took after HP acquired another Ashutosh startup, AppIQ in 2005.

Ashutosh holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in computer science from Penn State University. After working for LSI and Intergraph, he joined StorageNetworks. Later he founded Serano Systems, a fiber channel controller manufacturer that he sold to Vitesse Semiconductor.^[37] His next venture was AppIQ, which was acquired by HP in 2005.^[38][39] After leaving HP in 2008, Ashutosh became a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, where he was an investor in information technology companies, and ultimately founded Actifio.^[40] He left Greylock in 2009 to focus full-time on Actifio, serving as its president and CEO.^[41]

As CEO of Actifio, Ashutosh has pursued a strategy of hiring multiple former CEOs for leadership positions. Ashutosh said, “I don’t need to micro manage them. I don’t need to worry about the tactics they use.” As of June 2014, Actifio had eight former CEOs on staff. Ashutosh also said that clear accountability is important. He stated, “The buck has to stop somewhere. It can’t all be in a committee of five. I will take the fall if it doesn’t go right. I need people who see that. I ask them to check their CEO badge at the door.” ^[42] Ashutosh and Actifio's corporate culture both strongly emphasize the need to give clients an experience so good they are willing to refer new business. 20 percent of Ashutosh's compensation is tied to achieving a high "Net Promoter Score," a measure of customer willingness to give referrals.

As of 2013, Ashutosh was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School. He also lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[43]

In 2013, Ashutosh was named "EY Entrepreneur of the Year" for New England by Ernst & Young.^[44]

Ashutosh is originally from India.^[45]

Jim Sullivan

Jim Sullivan is Actifio's President. Sullivan was a founder of XIV, a maker of storage arrays that was acquired by IBM. Before that Sullivan held a senior position at EMC. Sullivan was a board member of ApplQ when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and of Diligent when it was acquired by IBM. He has an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Boston College.

David Chang

David Chang is Vice President of Products. Chang previously worked in senior roles at LSI, StorageNetworks, ApplQ, and Hewlett-Packard. Chang has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and a master's degree from National Technological University.

References