By Joseph F. Kovar
Data protection appliance vendor Actifio on Wednesday said it has received a new round of funding worth $50 million, and that it is in preparations to launch an IPO in the next couple years.
Actifio develops purpose-built data-protection appliances that manage backup, snapshot, business continuity, disaster recovery, test and development, analytics and other processes that create copies of production data.
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The goal is the creation of a single copy of data that can be used by all those processes, thereby easing the management of backup data.
The company earlier this year introduced the Actifio 100T, a new storage appliance for midsize to enterprise accounts, which provides both scale-up, or the ability to add capacity, and scale-out, which increases performance as more nodes are added to the system. The solution scales to up to 2 petabytes of capacity.
It also unveiled the Actifio Gateway, an appliance with no native storage capacity that virtualizes storage capacity from multiple vendors into a single storage pool that scales to up to 8 petabytes.
With the new D round of funding, total funding in Actifio stands at $107.5 million, said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of the Waltham, Mass.-based storage vendor.
The large funding round helps Actifio prepare for a possible IPO in the next 14 to 24 months, which Ashutosh said is the next logical step for the company.
“In this market, a leader has to be a public company,” he said. “There is a cachet about going public, and questions about future survivability go away.”
Actifio could be cash-flow-positive by late 2013, but that has not been a goal of the company, Ashutosh said.
“We’ve constantly looked at, is profitability important or is growth important?” he said. “We’re just a little dot on the market. So our focus has been on growth. Also, we’ve invested a lot in customer sat[isfaction]. That takes a lot of money. We’re focused not just on growth, but also on happy customers.”
This article was written by Joseph F. Kovar and originally published on crn
