Copy Data Management Firm Actifio Closes $100M Investment Round

Actifio, a developer of technology to help businesses manage all the copies of their data to improve backups, recovery and disaster recovery, on Monday said it received a new $100 million round of funding from several investment firms.

The new round of funding is slated to expand Actifio's go-to-market capabilities and to help find new ways to help customers efficiently manage their copy data, said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of the Waltham, Mass.-based company.

The new funding round gives Actifio a valuation of about $1 billion, but does not yet necessarily make it a candidate for IPO, Ashutosh said.

[Related: Actifio Looks To Simplify Storage Product Line, Channel Program]

"We can expect one [IPO] sometime as some customers may start saying their purchasing and legal guys are having heartburn because they want Actifio to be more transparent," he said. "But $100 million? For most companies, that's already an IPO."

With the new round, Actifio has raised about $207 million.

Actifio develops software married to an industry-standard server that virtualizes copy data to make it available for backup, disaster recovery, test and development, analytics, and compliance use, Ashutosh said.

Customers use Actifio to decouple application data from their physical infrastructure by making a single copy available for multiple purposes, thereby driving down the amount of data stored and the cost of storing it, he said.

When Actifio is used, customers can get rid of their existing data protection applications, Ashutosh said.

"We do the backup," he said. "When we come in, Symantec is gone. CommVault is gone. Our appliance sucks the data constantly from SAP and other applications. If you want to recover data, just point your VM [virtual machine] at it and you can access it instantly. Now it's possible to throw out tape and replace the software that wrote backups as if they were to tape."

About 22 percent of Actifio's sales goes to customers who use it to replace EMC NetWorker and other EMC technologies, while 15 percent goes to replace Symantec, 12 percent to replace CommVault and the rest to replace smaller vendors, Ashutosh said.

"Any time someone needs a copy of the data, we say, 'Just Actifio it,'" he said.

Actifio is the fastest-growing part of the business of Solutions-II, a Littleton, Colo.-based solution provider and Actifio channel partner.

Actifio is less of a storage solution and more a data solution, said Todd Bowling, president of Solutions-II.

NEXT: Actifio Is Strong In The Channel

"Actifio is addressing the biggest issue in data centers, what I call 'data pollution,'" Bowling said. "It's where customers store copy after copy after copy of the same data."

Most clients who use Actifio find it extremely easy to use, Bowling said. "That's a big deal," he said. "Most enterprise customers have cut their IT staff to the bone. For someone to come in and address the multiple snapshots and copies of data, and make the data available anytime and anywhere, that's worth its weight in gold."

In the year that Solutions-II has been working with Actifio, the vendor has provided top-notch training and support, Bowling said. "These guys are willing to go side by side with us to see our clients," he said. "They're doing more with us for clients than our larger vendors do."

About 87 percent of Actifio's business comes from channel partners, Ashutosh said. The company in mid-2014 plans to introduce a new channel-exclusive, midmarket offering for customers with under 20 TBs of data, he said.

Actifio currently manages over 1 exabyte of customer data, including data in the cloud, on-site or anywhere, Ashutosh said. "We let customers use any storage," he said. "They can mix-and-match. We decouple the management of the data from where it's stored."

Actifio also has some powerful partners. The company's technology is behind IBM's SmartCloud Data Virtualization solution and SunGard's Recover2Cloud cloud disaster recovery service.

Actifio is the second storage company that in 2014 unveiled $100 million investment rounds. Converged infrastructure vendor Nutanix in January closed a $101 million round, giving it a $1 billion total valuation.

PUBLISHED MARCH 24, 2014