ESG Videos

Christophe: Hello and welcome to Data Protection Conversations. My name is Christophe Bertrand. I am the senior analyst for data protection at ESG. I am joined today by David Chang, who is the SVP for products at Actifio. David, welcome.

David: Oh, very great to be here.

Christophe: So tell us a little bit more about what you do and about what Actifio does.

David: Absolutely. Thank you for having me here. So, again, my name's David Chang. I am responsible for product and, essentially, engineering product management for Actifio. So Actifio is an interesting company. We specialize in helping our customers manage their large databases, large data set, big scale, sort of, production environment.

So that's kind of the specialty we do, and what specifically is in the area of both test data management around accelerating their application development, modernize their data protection, business continuity, disaster recovery, and then finally helping them go into the cloud.

Christophe: Perfect, and clearly a lot of use cases that are very critical and lots of data. So everything seems easy, except when you add at scale, right?

David: Absolutely.

Christophe: So tell us about what some of your customers are facing in terms of challenges and where you've helped them with your solution.

David: Absolutely. So I think it's a fairly common problem is, as a wise man used to say, both in good and bad time, data grows, right. So the explosion of data is definitely a daily challenge that our customer, and prospective customer, has to deal with on a daily basis. Now, the issue there is not really the money, but also from a technology, you know, at the end of the day, you can't change physics, so if you have to protect a lot of data within a 24-hour period, you don't have a lot of options.

Christophe: Okay. Well, you haven't quite bent the time-space continuum yet, right?

David: We're still trying to do that, but that's a limitation still.

Christophe: Well, talking about the future and futuristic things you could be doing, what do you see as the next big disruptors in the market in the next few years?

David: I think all of our customers are, you know, we're in, I think, in a really interesting times, because the visibility for all technology companies and all large customer that consumes technology, the future is actually quite blurry, right. There's a lot of discussion around, is my internal IT the right answer, private cloud, or how fast and how much should I go to the public cloud?

Do I stick with virtual machines or containers? And how do I remain competitive in this kind of new world? And I think those are some of a lot of the questions many of our customers are struggling on a daily basis.

Christophe: And do you see any future for data protection, copy data management, and artificial intelligence?

David: Yeah. So I think those are really all the latest hot terminologies that we have to deal with on a daily basis, but I think what we, and really, and allow our customer to do is unlock the hidden value inside their enterprise. So what I mean by that is a lot of value is in this thing called database that our customer have purchased or have accumulated over the last 15, 20, 30 years, how to unlock the hidden value out of that data set, whether it's for your own more productive development cycle or unlock that so you can actually upload into the cloud, so you can run the Google Analytics.

A lot of the AWS, AI, and Azure, and so on and so forth, and having that data being able to go mobile and not locked into your production environment and the ability to use that on an efficient basis up for a multiple, one of these use cases, is something we help our customer do a lot.

Christophe: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. And I'd like to thank our viewers for also watching us. Please stay tuned for the next edition of Data Protection Conversations. Thank you very much.

David: Thank you.