Aparavi: You Have to Know What You Have to Put Your Data to Work

The Silicon Review

We have seen numerous changes in the technology industry and the influence it has had on business. When it comes down to it, data is the lifeblood of every business. Without knowing it, accessing it, and controlling it you are at a disadvantage, losing money and open to risk. We know today that there are niche tools, old data management practices that are complex, costly, and provide very little control or understanding of your data. They generally copy, replicate, back up data without knowing its true value which costs organizations millions of dollars every year.

It is legitimately a data chaos. It is in the data centers, various clouds, the edge, and the endpoints of the network. It is in structured databases, semi-structured email applications, and unstructured streams, pools, and data lakes. It is also in places it probably should not be, such as in file-sharing sites, social media, and mobile devices. This is where California-based Aparavi is making a difference with its Data Intelligence and Automation Platform. The company helps organizations find and unlock the value of data no matter where it lives.

“Our solution is a SaaS platform and can be deployed on-premise also. It is designed to be scalable and addresses the demand of today’s data,” says Adrian Knapp, Founder and CEO of Aparavi. He founded Aparavi to truly manage unstructured content, secure access for modern data demands of analytics, machine learning, and collaboration. Today, its platform connects business and IT to transform data into a competitive asset. “Our new platform reduces complexity, operating expenses, and risk while providing greater insight into their information. Aparavi’s intelligent search and advanced automation helps users find, classify, protect, and optimize their data from the edge, on-premises, and across multi-cloud storage to break through data silos and transform and simplify data operations,” adds the CEO.

Aparavi is a company that places high emphasis on customer success. Led from the front by Adrian Knapp, the company has a flat hierarchy where the leadership wears numerous hats and focuses strongly on customer input and closed feedback loop. But how does the company tackle the data chaos problem through its solutions? “Starts with an idea, ideas are built upon, experts from diverse backgrounds and similar – all contribute,” says Adrian. “If you fail, fail fast and adjust. There are no bad ideas and we take into account inputs from our customers first, then technologists, and all our partners. We validate and adjust continually.”

Control Your Data

Year after year, decade after decade data management has increasingly focused primarily on the high availability of databases, which is ironic given that 80% of enterprisedata is unstructured. This means that many different types of files have different structures, value, complexity, and sources of creation. This is growing faster and faster with commercial IoT data streams. But copying, backing up data without understanding its value, is like moving house and packing up everything and unloading in the new house before actually trimming down the data, deleting redundant and the obsolete content. “Our vision is to provide control of data chaos/sprawl with intelligent search across different data sources and locations along with advanced automation to help our customers classify, and optimize their data from the edge, on-premises, and across hybrid and multi-cloud storage to transform and simplify operations,” says the CEO.

Aparavi has a great commitment to delivering and managing data in an optimized way. But it has not been easy, as the company is tackling a huge problem of an industry that relies on old school data management and is bent on picking solutions that create redundant data. “Educating a market on alternate and more efficient ways to manage data proactively is one of our core marketing objectives,” reflects Gary Lyng, CMO of Aparavi. Hence, the company has to pivoted to improve its positioning to know the audience it was addressing. “Knowing the audiences, perspectives, and valuation of data helped us tune our use cases, our supporting content as well as deployment into our customers, involving the right parties within a business, in many cases representatives from the data community as well as key personnel from IT,” said Gary.

The company embraced a ‘use case first’ approach with its Aparavi platform and built both GTM and content to support the customer use case. “This is unlike others who push and push the technology, the features, and specs. We build a cascading value proposition covering both business, data community and IT community value propositions, so that all can easily understand our why, our how, and what we deliver,” says the CMO.

Nobody had anticipated the outbreak of COVID-19 and the havoc it would wreak in the world of business and data. Aparavi platform’s launch has eased some companies’ pain. While the budgets remain tight if not frozen, the importance of data continues to increase. Aparavi is helping reduce the risk, cost, and is putting businesses in control so that they can make the money from deriving insights from their data. “The value of risk reduction and cost reduction coupled with the pressure of compliance as well as the opportunity to create new revenue streams or at least competitive insight from data is being received well and ramping our adoption. Moreover, our SaaS pricing model has a low bar of entry and the budget is predictable, no surprises for our customers,” says Gary.

It is amazing how Aparavi is addressing the most demanding data challenges through a single platform for data governance, compliance, IT consolidation, and new open secure access for additional applications in the cloud.

The Tech Leader

Adrian Knapp, Founder and CEO: Adrian has had the vision to truly transform the way unstructured data is captured, managed and made available to enable innovation. He has been immersed in the data industry for all of his career. He was Co-founder of Dicom/Kofax (LSE:KFX), Mount10 (IPO Neuer Markt 2001), and Novastor Software where he still holds role as Chairman of the Board. Additionally, he is a valued member of the Forbes Technology Council contributing with his points of view on the evolving data market.