Arctera CEO: Focus is on new capabilities for backup products
Data backup vendor Arctera, which consists of former Veritas businesses, will continue to sell these products separately as it looks to improve and expand its offerings.
Arctera's CEO Lawrence Wong sees the company's real challenge is reinvention and expansion after spinning off from Veritas in November 2024.
Last month, the data protection vendor rebranded its Data Compliance Platform as the Arctera Insight Platform, uniting disparate automated data auditing and compliance monitoring offerings under one banner while adding new capabilities.
The rebranding doesn't significantly change Arctera's core software, but is meant to be a first step towards establishing a new company vision, Wong said.
"I frame ourselves as the world's oldest startup," Wong said.
A major challenge facing Arctera will be assuring a diverse and large base of SMB and smaller enterprise customers that its core data protection platform Backup Exec will remain a priority, said Christophe Bertrand, an analyst at TheCube Research.
"There's a lot of intent and planning in what they're going to do," Bertrand said. "The statement that they're an old startup is true."
New company
Arctera opened the doors at its Pleasanton, California, headquarters shortly after Cohesity acquired Veritas in December last year. It has 1,500 employees operating out of 35 offices globally, according to Wong.
Arctera, referred to as DataCo before it launched, offers three specific products spun off from Veritas. These are InfoScale, a software-defined-storage tool for high availability; Backup Exec, a cloud backup platform for SMBs; and the Arctera Insight Platform data visibility tools.
Wong has been participating in calls to ensure customers understand that nothing is immediately changing or going away, while the company also grows its user base and develops more capabilities.
"We're a growth company and we're looking for opportunities to expand," he said. "[But] right now, we're focused on maximizing the assets that we have."
For example, the company is focusing on developing the Arctera Insight Platform, said Wong.
The platform now includes a Generative AI assistant for document summaries, topic highlights and other text parsing capabilities for more than 120 apps and services, including message services like Apple iMessage or Microsoft Teams.
Insight Platform has focused on industry compliance and record keeping, but its tools can also assist in understanding the provenance of data used in a company's GenAI product or finding old stores that are a ransomware target.
"What was historically a backroom cost of business piece [has] all of a sudden become a [executive] board-level conversation, particularly with the advent of ransomware and AI," Wong said.
There is no plan currently to connect the three different Arctera products together into a larger platform or service, Wong said, but they may be integrated more as sales increase.
"We’ll see these things start to converge [and] come together at some point," he said.
Customers think about how Arctera products solve discreet problems in their stack rather than looking for a more encompassing platform, he added.
New challenges
Arctera is correct to keep these products separate for the more price-conscious customers, Bertrand said.
The company might take a more SaaS or platform approach in the future, but it’s making a strategic move to focus on its core offerings in these early days.
"It doesn’t mean [they] can’t cross-pollinate," Bertrand said. "There’s an interesting upsell potential once they’re in a [customer] account. The borders are very porous."
Having the catalog remain separate gives Arctera time to understand the specific challenges its customers face now, said Krista Case, an analyst at Futurum Group.
As the SMB products shed from the enterprise-focused platforms of Veritas and Cohesity, Arctera needs to approach the market and its customer needs differently, Case said. Keeping these products separate will likely reach a broader customer base, especially as backup vendor options winnow down.
"It gives Arctera some very specific avenues to talk about customer challenges," Case said. "I think there's a degree of interoperability today and it'll be something to keep an eye on."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
