What I Learned at Actifio’s Data Driven 2018 Conference

I had the good fortune of spending two days last week in Miami Beach at Actifio’s annual Data Driven user and partner conference.  As promised by our Actifio friends, this event was an an excellent opportunity to learn from some of the industry thought leaders and solution experts on how to manage the world’s data—often considered the “oil” of modern times for its potential to fuel the world economy.

The event started off with an interesting panel presentation on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).  As we grow our cloud storage business at Wasabi, we don’t often encounter the use of GCP for storage purposes in the market as much as we see AWS S3.  Still, after meeting with several of the GCP team members, it’s clear that GCP has a solid storage offering and we look forward to competing with them for enterprise customer business.

The event continued with several well-run panel sessions spanning a wide range of topics including IoT, financial services, and healthcare.  Wasabi has customers in all of these industry verticals today, so these panels were a great opportunity learn about the challenges these industry experts are facing when managing their data and how important the migration to cloud storage is to them.

My favorite part of day 1 was the technical session I attended on “The Future of Object Storage”.  This session was run by two of Actifio’s solution architects and was an excellent primer for those in the audience that were not familiar with object storage and how to leverage it with the Actifio platforms.

Marty Falaro (Wasabi’s VP Sales & Alliances) and I had the pleasure of finishing up the day delivering a technical session to over 100 attendees on the topic of “Leveraging Public Cloud Storage With Actifio + Wasabi.”   It is clear from the level of attention and questions we received in this session that the migration to public cloud storage is a topic of great interest to most of the IT professionals in attendance.

Day 2 of the event continued with an exciting 1:1 chat between Ash Ashutosh, Actifio’s CEO and Steve Duplessie, ESG Senior Analyst.   It was great to hear these two storage industry titans share their thoughts on topics around enabling the data driven enterprise and more.

Speaking of industry titans, Wasabi was fortunate to share the stage with thought leaders from Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM on the last panel of the day titled “Seeing Through The Clouds”.   Actifio has done an excellent job of ensuring seamless compatibility with all public cloud platforms and this panel was the opportunity to discuss the strengths of each platform relative to others. It was clear from this panel and the audience feedback the economics of cloud storage are quite important to enterprises planning the migration to the cloud.  The spirited discussion in this panel regarding how Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM all charge for data egress and API calls (yet Wasabi does not) made it clear that Wasabi Hot Cloud storage has some meaningful cost advantages that enterprises need to consider.

Of course, the highlight of the event for many Boston sports fans was to listen to Brian Shield, CIO of the Boston Red Sox discuss his IT challenges (and a few non-IT sports topics) on a panel with Brian Bark, a former Red Sox pitcher and now IT executive.  It was clear from this talk that the Actifio platform provides meaningful benefits to the Red Sox and it’s nice to see one Boston institution embrace the benefits of another Boston-based company, Actifio. Now if we can just get the Red Sox to put a little Wasabi on those Fenway Franks, we can help the Red Sox continue their winning ways not only on the field but in cloud storage as well.