Ash Ashutosh brings more than 25 years of storage industry and entrepreneurship experience to his role of CEO at Actifio. Ashutosh is a recognized leader and architect in the storage industry where he has spearheaded several major industry initiatives, including iSCSI and storage virtualization, and led the authoring of numerous storage industry standards. Ashutosh was most recently a Partner with Greylock Partners where he focused on making investments in enterprise IT companies. Prior to Greylock, he was Vice President and Chief Technologist for HP Storage.

Ashutosh founded and led AppIQ, a market leader of Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions, which was acquired by HP in 2005. He was also the founder of Serano Systems, a Fibre Channel controller solutions provider, acquired by Vitesse Semiconductor in 1999. Prior to Serano, Ashutosh was Senior Vice President at StorageNetworks, the industry’s first Storage Service Provider. He previously worked as an architect and engineer at LSI and Intergraph.

Ashutosh remains an avid supporter of entrepreneurship and is an advisor and board member for several commercial and non-profit organizations. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Penn State University.

What motivated Ashutosh to start a company? 

“I really enjoy the thrill of a startup life. I like working hard and while I was working at my job I started to get a little bored. So I decided to start a company when I knew very little about startups. It was a great experience ” says Ash Ashutosh.  He is a recognized leader in the storage industry. In 2009 he seized the opportunity in area of copy data management and started Actifio.  Why did he start a company during the time when the startup bubble had burst? “I am not follower of bubbles and burst. The company was started to meet an unmet need ." Actifio is in the space of Copy Data Management – CDM where he saw a big market opportunity. 

Companies make many copies of the same electronic data to analyze and share it and also to protect themselves if their computing infrastructure crashes, say, due to a blackout or to comply with record retention policies. Those copies are produced by different people in different departments. In the past, those copies were stored in different ways – including magnetic tapes, hard disk, and even on paper hived away in boxes.  Several trends including the growing popularity of virtualization – a way to store and retrieve data with less hardware – coupled with the rising share of hard disk as the primary medium for data storage meant that CDM could get much more efficient.

 

In July 2009,  Ashutosh opened up Actifio in the space abandoned by a failed Greylock portfolio company in Waltham.  â€œI took over the company as CEO and thought I would quit once I find a CEO. However that was not to be,” says Ashutosh.

According to Ashutosh,  Actifio’s product can cut by 95 percent the “data footprint” that companies create in their CDM process while reducing by 75 percent the amount of “network bandwidth” required to move it around their data centers. Since introduction of their Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) product, Actifio has been growing at “500% year-over-year – faster than any enterprise storage company ever.”

 

The secret recipe for success amounts simply to finding a big problem to solve, surrounding yourself with great colleagues who you love working with and “focusing on actual customer success and nothing else” says Ashutosh.  Actifio has focused on customer needs by shifting over time from offering software to appliances to a SaaS model.

The term “Unicorn” which has now come to mean CEO of companies that are valued at more than a Billion is applied to Ashutosh, whose company Actifio fits the bill.  However, Ash Ashutosh is quick to shift the focus away from Unicorns. “I’d rather be a mule my customer loves than a unicorn my investor loves.”

He has plenty of advice for entrepreneurs. What helped him tide over difficult times?

“I think entrepreneurs are delusional. They mostly chose not to see the dangers ahead of them. Family support is very important.”

What advice does he have for South Asians who may consider becoming entrepreneurs?

“South Asians have the big advantage of family support. That is a big safety net. I would strongly urge anyone who has a passion to go for it.”