News Article
Actifio launches in Australia
August 7, 2013
Storage virtualisation company Actifio has officially launched in Australia, holding an event in Sydney for users and prospects.
The company has been selling in Australia through channels for over a year, but has now set up a direct presence to support its distributor, resellers and growing customer base.
Actifio CEO and founder Ash Ashutosh told iTWire that he regards Australia and New Zealand as a major growth area for the company. “This is one of the strongest regions in the world for virtualisation,” he said. “It is internationally acknowledged that Australian enterprises are early adopters of virtualisation and other data centre technologies.”
But Ashutosh said most organisations are facing huge challenges backing-up and retrieving business critical data such as financial records, sales and human resources information and customer data. Actifio, which he founded in 2009, sells storage virtualisation tools designed to address that problem.
“Australian enterprises are facing a tsunami of data, and most of it is an excess copy of something they already have. By virtualising the storage and management of data, Actifio can replace any or all of the siloed data protection and availability storage applications a company might be using, with a single system that’s purpose-built to manage copy data.”
Actifio aims to do to storage what VMware has done to servers, said Ashutosh. “Companies and public sector organisations are required by law to keep digital copies of all kinds of data – often for many years. But it all has to be kept somewhere, and often accessed at short notice.
“In the digital age, that adds up to a major problem that can dramatically impact an organisation’s ability to function. This is a global problem and it is the fastest growing area of the IT industry. We are often talking about organisations having to use hundreds of Terabytes of compute resources to manage this issue.”
According to an IDC study, the global cost of copy data is US$44 billion. The study also found that organisations can have anywhere from 13 to 120 copies of data across all their applications. “This is leading to major challenge. It is no longer economically viable to build more server farms or rely on the traditional tape-to-tape back-up and recovery solutions,” said Ashutosh.
Gartner has positioned Actifio in its 2013 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software in the ‘visionaries’ quadrant. Of hundreds of storage vendors, only the top fifteen were featured in the report. “This confirms Actifio’s vision to continue innovating in the storage industry and bringing valuable services to end-users and channel partners alike,” said Ashutosh.
Actifio says its copy data storage platform lets businesses recover anything instantly, for up to 90% less cost than using conventional backup techniques. It does this by creating a virtualised ‘time machine’ of past copies of date, preventing duplication for multiple purposes. Ashutosh, who formerly worked in HP’s storage division before moving into venture capital, told iTWire the idea for the company came about after his investor group researched CIOs about their biggest concerns.
Data storage was towards the top of the list. Actifio was born to address these needs, with Ashutosh originally intending to act as CEO in for the three month the startup phase. Four years later, he is still there. “I love building things,” he says.