Talking Innovation with the Feds

June 16, 2012
By Erica Tran

These past few weeks have been really exciting for our company and for the Actifio user community. After launching PAS 5.0 – a sweeping platform update to our signature capabilities – we’ve had the chance to meet with over 1000 IT professionals at IBM Edge, Gartner IOM Summit, 2 VMware User Groups, CIO Synergy and most recently an event hosted by one of our investors, Andreessen Horowitz.

This last event, “Innovation: Silicon Valley Meets Washington D.C.,” was designed as a dialogue on how innovative and disruptive technologies can really shake how the Federal Government thinks about IT, productivity and cost savings. We heard from big wigs like Michael Chertoff (former Secretary of U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security from 2005-2009), and Ben Horowitz (Co-Founder and General Partner of A16Z,) in a series of talks that also featured Actifio’s own Brylan Achilles (Head of Solution Architecture). A few of the more interesting ideas that emerged across the panels and keynotes:

Entrepreneurship is Patriotic – Even Ben flew across the country on his birthday to address the audience – much to the dismay of his family who probably had something really nice planned.
Big Data is having a huge impact on Government Spending – After 9/11 our agencies went though a spending binge with massive IT infrastructure changes so that many data sources could be consolidated and analyzed to find patterns. Secretary Chertoff credited this change as a key factor in finding Bin Laden. The consequence is that we’re now storing, sharing and analyzing more data than ever. With the Federal budget getting cut – agencies need to look at new innovative companies for help to effectively manage the data explosion.
Security is paramount – Cost savings and productivity gains can’t come at the expense of data protection and availability. This is at the heart of many tradeoffs that the U.S. Government makes to keep it’s citizens safe vs. balanced budgets.

What we’re doing here at Actifio hits the core of these key themes. We’re proud to be supporting our troops, and creating jobs in an economy that needs them. We think we bring something unique to the problem of managing the big data explosion, namely the ability to back it all up without breaking the bank. And freeing up precious resources from brute force backup, while making data more available than it was before, is a priority not only for local/state/federal agencies looking to do more with less, but for all the businesses who are in exactly the same boat.