By David Meiselman, VP of Digital Marketing – Last week, hundreds of Actifians and partners gathered in Boston for our 2014 Worldwide Kickoff and it was simply awesome.
As someone who doesn’t get out of HQ that often, but frequently works with remote partners and account teams worldwide, Kickoff is a great opportunity to connect with the people who are building our company into a global phenomenon. Actifio now delivers copy data virtualization to customers in over 30 countries worldwide and the pace of our growth was palpable at the event. It was also notable to me how impressive all the attendees in the extended organization (partners included) were and how universally excited they are about the value Actifio is already delivering to customers.
As account teams and partners shared stories about how customers are delivering massive business value for their organizations via Actifio, certain themes came up again and again. Business Resiliency, Agility, and Access to the Cloud are among the top strategic priorities of senior IT execs and Actifio is uniquely positioned to deliver dramatic improvements in all of them. At a time when many organizations are chained by their legacy physical infrastructure, our Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology decouples data from that infrastructure.
Time after time at kickoff we heard stories of how new customer organizations realized this value at a strategic level and embraced the concept of being able to capture their production application data once, manage it efficiently and economically in a single golden copy, and use it whenever and wherever they need to for a whole variety of uses. As I had previously remarked last summer at VMworld, people may get interested in Actifio because of the economic advantages of reducing their storage footprint and eliminating licenses for a bevy of point tools, but their eyes really open and light up when they begin to understand Actifio’s ability to give instant access to their data and what that can mean at a strategic level for their organizations.
Sheila Childs of Gartner also gave a great keynote on the current state of the marketplace which reinforced a lot of the themes discussed by others. The desire of CIOs to focus on the management of data vs. infrastructure was matched by an incredible willingness to look to new vendors to deliver on that capability. Sheila reported that Gartner estimates 70% of IT execs surveyed will change their technology vendors/sourcing relationships in the next two to three years. And when you stop and think about it, no wonder. These organizations are spending a lot of money just to keep their old/current infrastructure running and they need to find unique approaches that provide savings that can be better spent on their strategic transformation priorities.
The focus on improved resiliency, agility, and access to the cloud was reinforced by many outside presenters as well. Customers need to move beyond data protection to true business resiliency and they are excited at the prospect of taking something that was seen as an insurance policy and using it as a strategic asset to drive their business. CIOs who attended the event said that agility was key to them and the ability to deliver new applications faster would become the difference between being in business and being out of business. And from Gartner research to anecdotes told by partners, it was clear that the march to the cloud is quickly leading to a day where more than half of an organization’s data will reside outside of their data center and more than half of companies will run their business in the cloud.
This was the perfect underpinning to why everybody in the room was excited for Actifio’s prospects in the year to come and beyond. Several people who were new to the company or were new partners remarked to me that they were blown away by how excited everyone at Actifio was about what we are doing and where we are going. I would just smile and explain that I was too, and for good reason.