Actifio makes IPO U-turn

Data virtualisation vendor shelves IPO plans as it looks to become profitable by the end of 2016

Data virtualisation vendor Actifio has made an IPO U-turn and expects to be profitable for the first time by the end of the year, according to its CEO Ash Ashutosh.

Actifio specialises in copy data virtualisation which sees a "golden" copy of data created, from which virtual copies can be made without taking up additional storage space.

Last year Ashutosh said he saw an IPO as "the next big milestone" for the firm, which was founded in 2009, but he has now told CRN that IPOs are not all that they are cracked up to be.

"This fascination with being public is a little overrated and I think we're learning now, very quickly, that you can create Uber - a $67bn company - being completely private, so why go public unless we have to?" he said.

Ashutosh explained that there are two reasons to go public: if potential customers are demanding it, or if investors are; neither of which is happening to Actifio yet.

"Some of the largest institutions in the world are powered by Actifio, and six of the 10 largest service providers, so there are enough people who haven't worried about our being public yet," he said.

"At less than seven years old, one: Actifio is young, and two: there are enough private markets to take care of people taking liquidity, so it's not an issue for us."

Actifio has partnerships with a number of major service providers including IBM, NTT Data and Verizon. Steve Jackson, EMEA director of partners and alliances at Actifio, told CRN that the dynamic in these relationships has started to change.

"We're not only supplying as the engine of the DR strategies and database-as-a-service strategies, they are also now acting as a reseller opportunity for us, alongside the traditional resellers such as Computacenter and SCC," he said.

Gary Hawkins, director of solutions, design and engineering at Verizon, added that Actifio's proposition is becoming increasingly easy to sell because of the way it fits in with systems offered by the likes of VMware and Oracle.

"We've seen with Actifio that the way it presents itself, and the way it connects into the technology stack, means it is much easier to get a C-level person to think 'I can absolutely see the cost saving', because they can keep their same infrastructure," he said.

Ashutosh has now set his sights on making Actifio profitable by the end of the year.

"[First] you spend time building the core technology, then you spend time building the core business. The third stage is how do you scale up this business to be a large institution? That's the phase we're moving into," he said.

"We are focusing on getting to be a profitable business so we can create a sustaining institution. It's going to be growth balanced with getting to be a profitable company - that's going to be a big tipping point for us this year."