Press Release
Actifio, North Bridge Venture Partners, Gigaom Research and Industry Collaborators Unveil Results of 2013 Future of Cloud Computing Survey
June 19, 2013
Waltham, MA – June 19, 2013 –Actifio™, the radically simple copy data management company, today announced its role as a collaborator in releasing the results of the third annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey, conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM Research and supported by 56 other collaborating organizations. This year’s survey is the largest to date, examining viewpoints on drivers, inhibitors and opportunities in cloud computing across 855 respondents, including business users, IT decision makers and cloud vendors.
Cloud adoption continued to rise in 2013, with 75 percent of those surveyed reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform – up from 67 percent last year. Respondents stated that Copy Data Management – a $44B market – including Backup, and Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity is one of the fastest growth areas for cloud services. This year’s survey finds several important shifts in why and how cloud computing is being used. Survey Highlights include:
- Big Data and Copy Data Management – Fastest Cloud Growth Areas:
- Respondents stated that 6 out of the top 7 fastest areas of growth in cloud applications will be in IT areas: Copy Data Management (Backup, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity), Big Data, mobile, systems management, helpdesk and security
- Agility and scalability – Primary drivers for Cloud Adoption:
- More than half of respondents cited business agility (54.5%)
- Cost is close behind with 48% citing it as a driver
- Cloud APIs are also cited as important this year as users look to move beyond stove pipe applications to more integrated business services
- Flexibility and Reliability – Key Barriers to Cloud Adoption:
- Vendor lock-in (35%) and Interoperability (27%) continue to weigh on customer’s minds as they look for best of breed choices in the schism between a few large players and the long tail of alternative emerging vendors
- Reliability (22.3%) and complexity (21%) were among the top inhibitors, reflecting real world obstacles to an “always-on” services infrastructure
The survey results findings demonstrate the rapid adoption of Copy Data Management strategies by Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Recognizing this market need, Actifio pioneered Copy Data Storage (CDS) to manage copies of production data and eliminate redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications (including backup, snapshot, business continuity, disaster recovery and test and development). Actifio can replace any or all of the siloed data protection and availability storage applications with a single system that’s purpose-built to manage copy data. By integrating data deduplication, network and processor optimization, Actifio creates a single, perfect copy of production data and maintains changes to that master copy. Doing so delivers recovery times in minutes instead of hours, even for large-scale application data sets. This gives users a simple application running in a single user interface to recover anything, from any time, instantly.
For service providers, Actifio delivers a revolutionary value proposition: Enterprise-class SLA driven services with guaranteed RPO and RTO, at a price competitive with consumer-grade, quality-of-service based offerings. Actifio’s management framework includes a Cloud API, which enables providers to easily integrate Copy Data Storage into their own Cloud Delivery Platform.
“This year’s survey confirms what we hear from our MSP users every day – delivering new services is overly complex and costly – which ultimately impact SLA’s,” said Ash Ashutosh, Founder & CEO, Actifio, “Together with our service provider partners, we’re enabling a whole new generation of innovative cloud data management services to help accelerate adoption of new cloud based applications that enhance both business agility and resiliency – all from a single platform.”
Supporting Quotes:
Michael Skok, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners
“Clearly, even in the 3rd year of our survey, we’re still very early in the cloud-computing revolution. Yet the cloud formations we identified in last year’s survey are clearly on an unstoppable rise. Self-empowered consumers and businesses are taking the lead, and in many instances, regardless of IT. But IT is investing heavily both adapting internal infrastructure and adopting public infrastructure to respond on demand while managing the inevitable issues of compliance and regulation through hybrid approaches. And to realize the promise of the cloud, there is a clear call for the industry as a whole to help reduce complexity, and provide better interoperability.”
Describing a vision of Bring Your Own Cloud services (BYOC) and the new reality of what Skok calls “Boundary-less” computing and “Out-servicing” he continued:
“Cloud services are being adopted and used in a “boundary-less” way where users are seamlessly integrating them at home and work across all their devices. And in an increasingly mobile pattern of business today companies are compelled to accept and adopt this BYOC model. In fact businesses themselves are adopting the boundary-less approach as they look to disintermediate and squeeze money from their value chains, focus on their core competencies and “out-service” (outsource non-core services) via the cloud. With all this in mind they are looking to gain competitive advantage from a core benefit of the cloud, namely continuous innovation by passing it along to their customers in the form of faster time to market and responsiveness to market needs.” (For more including industry predictions, see [link to mjskok.com] blog post.)
David Card, Vice President of Research, GigaOM
“Technology buyers expect cloud adoption will make managing IT increasingly complex, yet the plurality also expect overall better cost of ownership. That’s either wishful thinking or an intriguing opportunity for suppliers and systems integrators.”
Supporting Links:
About North Bridge:
Established in 1994, North Bridge is an active partner for early-stage entrepreneurs, providing seed-to-growth financing for innovative companies looking to disrupt big markets. North Bridge partners, many founders themselves, work with entrepreneurs to apply their expertise in the creation, operation and scaling of market-leaders. The firm has offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California. To learn more about North Bridge go to www.northbridge.com.