Channel Post speaks to Greg Scorziello, the General Manager for EMEA at Actifio, to understand the company, its product portfolio and the company’s channel and marketing strategies for the year ahead.
Give us an overview about your organization.
Actifio is headquartered in Waltham MA, USA with subsidiaries around the world. The company has been founded by Ash Ashutosh and is privately held.
Actifio differentiates between production data and copies of production data and has introduced the concept of ‘copy data management‘.
IDC has identified copy data being a $44B problem worldwide which represents a huge potential of savings for customers.
As your slogan describes you Radically Simple, can you please explain what is so radical in your product and solutions?
Traditional architectures requires separate tools e.g. for backup, snapshot, disaster recovery, test & development etc.
All of these tools take independent copies of the production data, leading to exponential data growth, huge complexity and increasing costs.
Actifio simplifies this radically by collapsing these functions to a single platform, taking a single golden copy of the production data and allowing the customer to manage virtual copies centrally.
The net results are dramatic cost savings, far less data growth, less footprint, less storage requirements and instead, features like immediate restore and zero backup windows.
Actifio operates in a niche area of storage, so what is your target audience? Which industry verticals do you focus upon?
Any customer struggling to keep up with exponential data growth and backup windows should be looking into the concept of copy data management.
The more production data a company manages, the higher the requirement to manage this efficiently and realize savings.
How important is the Middle East market for you?
Within the EMEA region, the Middle East has been addressed by us almost simultaneously to our European Operations.
We consider the Middle East as an important growth market with customers being conscious and open to the latest IT trends.
What sort of channel partners do you work with in the Middle East region?
We are very lucky to work with our distribution partner Spectrami in the Middle East region, who has been instrumental for our business growth and for making relevant introductions to reselling partners and customers.
What is your marketing strategy for the Middle East region?
It is important for us to be present at key industry events in the region and also to assist our partners with their outreach.
We will continue to invest in this region and will in fact increase our investments this year by 20%.
Which products and solutions are your star products for Middle East region?
Actifio represents the efficient and radically simple management of copy data. Gartner has just recently recognized us a Visionary in their latest Magic Quadrant.
We look forward to continuing to propose our solution to key customers in the Middle East and help them to harvest their portion of the $44B potential savings.
What are your channel strategies for Middle East region?
We continue to look for new reselling partners to help them solve their customer’s biggest problems around data protection and exponential data growth.
At the same time we look into deepening the relationship with existing partners and support their competence with targeted trainings, access to experts and core assets.
The Channel is an important part of our overall strategy and we will continue our substantial investment into dedicated resources and support for the channel.
How do you see the IT storage market in the Middle East region evolving?
The problems around copy data due to the traditional approach is the same in all territories around the globe.
We expect the market to resonate on the latest trend as the challenges with traditional architecture have become so evident.
