CRN: Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh: The Future Will Include Storage Designed For Apps, Not Infrastructure

By Joseph Kovar, CRN – January 8 2020

‘When you get to an app-down design, where it’s infrastructure-agnostic, where it’s truly being aware of what an application really needs, the ability for us to do things in all kinds of platforms and speeds and costs, that’s what really allows us to go back and derive more value out of the data that customer has,’ Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh tells CRN.

Cloud Storage With An Application Focus

Actifio doesn’t really like to call itself a storage company or a cloud storage company. The Waltham, Mass.-based company instead focuses on data management, with a focus on the applications businesses use and the service level agreements (SLAs) they need. Actifio’s release last month of its Actifio 10c copy data management platform emphasized its ability to help enterprises improve their ability to use cloud services to accelerate their data-driven transformation initiatives. The release of its Actifio Go Software-as-a-Service platform early last year, meanwhile, gave it a head start in the growing multi-cloud copy data management market.

Ash Ashutosh, co-founder and CEO of Actifio, recently told CRN that while most companies looking to manage data across on-premises and the cloud started from the infrastructure side of the business, Actifio started from an application focus. That move makes it easier to provide a data management platform more in tune with business requirements, particularly as businesses look at data strung across multiple clouds.

Privately held Actifio in mid-2018 raised a $106 million round of funding, making it one of the unicorns of the storage world with a valuation at the time of $1.3 billion.

Here is what Ashutosh had to say about why the application focus on data management is important and about where Actifio is looking to move going forward.