Today marks the start of Actifio 2.0.

It’s an ending of sorts… of the rocket-shot enterprise technology startup headquartered in the dank recesses of somebody else’s abandoned data center. A lot of good work got done in that space, by a small group of really good people willing to work hard and spend carefully until Actifio could connect with its marketplace. The work these people did established Actifio as the fastest growing enterprise storage company from inception ever, and for all the fun poked at the cut corners and duct-tape ingenuity of those three years, it’s the foundation of whatever great things this company will achieve in its well lit, more reliably networked, clean-bathroomed future. To those of you who were here, from those of us who were not… Thank You.

It’s really a beginning, though, a coming-out party for a new Actifio. Ash calls it the transition “from startup to grownup,” and describes it in terms of operational priorities to improve:

• Predictability in the problems we solve, the solutions we offer, and the business returns we deliver to our customers;
• Leadership in terms of market share, technical innovation, analyst support, and press coverage; and
• Maturity in terms of the quality of our offerings, service, support, sales approach, and communication.

All of these things are important. To make these changes on the outside, though, we need to change on the inside first. In the words of author and technology entrepreneur Jonathan Lockwood Huie:

“To change who you are, change who you think you are.”

So in a sense, today marks the start of an effort by 170 or so people in 7 or so countries around the world to change who they think they are. To help us along we’ll be working from beautiful new offices in both Waltham and Hyderabad. We’ll have simplified our product line and our messaging, and piled a heaping dose of both on our brand new web site. We’ll be taking the polish and production value of just about everything up a notch… holding ourselves to a little higher standard of professionalism in activating the 33 new customers we brought into the family last quarter, walking a little taller at major shows this week from Santa Clara to Dubai.

We test drove this approach at the big VMWorld show in San Francisco last month, and the results were amazing.  There’s a video summary of what went down at the end of this post, and also a pretty good indication of the tremendous progress we’ve made as a brand and as a team in a remarkably short time.

Here’s wishing my fellow Actifians a great day, wherever in that day – or in the world – they are. Our future is bright, my friends. And it starts today.