"They havent hit that magic number of customer reference accounts," Silver says. Arkivio has announced only one customer so far, Allegra Systems. According to Giovanni Paliska, Arkivio's president and CEO, the firm is about to unveil a second. "We have our first Fortune 500 company, in the financial sector, which will be a marquee account for us," he says (see Arkivio Lands Customer).
Still, two customers is a bit slim for a software company founded in December 2000. Meanwhile, the startups that are raising VC funding today are demonstrating sustained customer traction (see Startups Tap VC Reserves and LeftHand Snatches $20M).
Paliska was cagey about how much financing Arkivio is seeking or how soon it needs to close an additional round. He says the company has enough money right now, but when pushed on how long it would last, he says: "We have quite a bit more than a month left." [Ed. note: Eeeek!]
That said, the financial sector could conceivably turn into a lucrative niche for Arkivio. The Fortune 500 customer mentioned above is apparently using Arkivios Auto-Stor policy automation software in conjunction with its data retention policy. Auto-Stor has a tiered storage infrastructure and provides a method to set policies regarding which data should be stored where, according to how long it needs to be kept.
"The banks have rigorous new rules on retaining emails and other business documents, and our software can automate this retention process for them," says Paliska. He is referring to the cases last December when five top Wall Street brokerage firms were fined a total of $8.25 million for not preserving email communications as required under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. Since then, storage retention policies have become an extremely sensitive issue for the financial community (see Storage Admins Fear Regs).
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
