Our utility pricing model is just one of the recent announcements that covers how Actifio is making copy data storage easy. It’s an important offering for our customers, and we wanted to offer more thoughts and details behind its launch.
Look around the industry and it’s clear that the modes of IT Consumption are changing. With the swipe a credit card, VMs and storage are readily available in the cloud. Companies are looking to SaaS players like Salesforce.com, Workday and ServiceNow, instead of deploying large-scale on-premise solutions. The “as a service” model for software is becoming the new normal.
At Actifio, we fully embrace this approach, with all of our internal systems in the cloud – from sales, customer support, travel, expense, to collaboration, and marketing. And that led us to ask the question “why not give our customers the choice to purchase in either a traditional CapEx way or a utility-based subscription?” In other words, why not bring the simplicity of a consumption-based procurement model to our copy data storage solutions? For service providers, it better aligns their infrastructure deployment with their customer demand, avoiding the cash flow impact of deploying capital too far ahead of revenues. For Enterprise IT, it helps instrument a charge-back or memo-back model for resource consumption.
The tenets of the utility pricing model are simple.
Predictability
Over the course of a three- or five-year term-based contract, the rates for both minimum consumption and overages are fixed. So, unlike a lease in which a late addition can dramatically increase the payments – since the additional cost is amortized over a shorter remaining term – incremental costs are known from day one.
Economic Value
The utility model is designed around the premise of pay-as-you-grow. As volumes increase, the rates ($/terabyte) decrease. And since the economic value of Actifio increases over time, the TCO and ROI benefits continue to mount. Leading storage analyst firm, ESG has independently validated that Actifio 5.1 can provide almost 300% IT efficiency savings over the competition.
Transparency
Actifio’s utility pricing is all-inclusive, including the complete software license, software appliance, storage, maintenance for the term, and installation services.
Future-Proofing
When customers renew their agreement term, the systems are refreshed and data migrated.
In all, our utility pricing is a unique and flexible method of getting started with our copy data storage system and helps make Actifio easy to approve.