This article is more than 1 year old

Arkivum's new CEO gets £3m cash boost to play with – now what?

AaaS steps out of academia into the big bad world

Interview Arkivum has gained £3m funding after appointing a new CEO. The firm is in the AaaS business, archiving as a service. When Guy Yaniv became CEO in June, the previous grand fromage, Jim Cook, became Chief Customer Officer. But he left in October and is now a Project Lead at Genomics England.

We asked Arkivum some questions, which were fielded by Rafael Bloom, the new Marketing and Business Development Director.

What were the problems Arkivum ran into?

None. If Arkivum had serious problems we wouldn't have been in a position to raise more capital. That's not to say business isn't without its challenges of course – Arkivum's new leadership is there to guide the company through the next phase of its development and growth. That means refocusing on revenue generation and expansion into new verticals.

Why was the CEO change made?

It's very uncommon for "founder CEOs" to remain in that position through all phases of a company's growth. We have a great relationship with Jim and massive respect for what he achieved. Nonetheless, what takes a company from inception to point A in its growth is not the same as what it takes to move a company from there to point B.

Why has it refocused its strategy?

Arkivum has done well from the academic sector, with a dominant market share of the top institutions, and has proved its capabilities in the heritage sector as well. In order to drive growth, we cannot just stick with that. Arkivum's growth strategy will transform the company by leveraging partnerships across the healthcare, life sciences and Financial Services sectors. We see huge potential given the challenges faced across those sectors in terms of burgeoning regulatory requirements, data volume growth, the total unacceptability of data loss, and the need for robust governance across the long-term data lifecycle. Those are all strengths for us, so hopefully the strategy makes sense.

Why is it building new partnerships that will enable it to harness commercial opportunities in sectors which are facing regulatory and operational challenges around long-term data retention such as healthcare, life sciences and financial services? Was it not doing this before?

As a relative newcomer to the company I don't want to speculate too much on the prior five years' strategy. I think the team did a great job turning an idea into a capability, and a capability into a revenue-generating company. As to why we're doing this now, I think the previous answer covers that.

How much prior funding had it raised?

I’ll have to confirm that number with you.

Why has it hired Guy Yaniv as CEO when he has not been a CEO before?

Guy has an amazing track record of leadership and over-achievement against goals within some of the most innovative and best-run companies in the tech world. One of Guy's roles at NICE was to run the company's security business, one of the three major units within a billion-dollar company. If you look at what Guy did there, the business was transformed and made into an asset that NICE spun off extremely profitably, which was the strategic imperative there at least. I think those are CEO skills, and regardless of the job title, Guy has demonstrated all the necessary skills to effect business transformation and drive revenue generation.

A funder's quote says: "The entrepreneurial management team at Arkivum have made great progress in recent months as they build out the business into new industry sectors." Was the previous management team not entrepreneurial enough?

I think it would be unfair for me to make a judgement of that nature – after all, I wouldn't be here to talk to you without their achievements. But the facts are that over the two quarters Guy has run Arkivum differently and we're now having conversations with parties in new verticals who can enable the rapid scaling of our business. If being entrepreneurial can be defined as being dynamic, not taking the status quo as fact, taking initiative, being daring and innovative – then yes I sense we are more entrepreneurial than before.

Comment

Arkivum developed good tech and sold it well enough into academia and the heritage preservation areas but didn't make headway outside.

Investors get Jim McKenna as chairman, a one-time COO of software biz Logica, and chairman of more companies than you can throw a stick at. He thinks (we think) Arkivum is wasting its tech talents in the heritage and academia backwaters and needs to be thrust out into the world outside. So first thing to do is hire a new CEO, keep the old one onboard for a while for continuity's sake, with some grand title like Chief Customer Officer, and get the business off and running.

Then Cooke gets to walk the plank; it's a rough old world out there. Bloom comes in to do market and business development; no need for a COO any more. He comes from Nice Systems, which was Yaniv's old stamping ground too. From Yaniv's point of view we would think three million quid is not a lot of cash, but it's prove-you-can-do-it money before any more is invested, with mainland Europe and the USA as potential markets, no doubt.

A side point – Steve Mackey is VP Channels at Arkivum, having joined from SpectraLogic in August 2014. He's a Jim Cook hire and was an engineer at EMI back in the early 1980s, and has IBM, DEC, ADIC and Quantum in his CV before that. We hope he's got a lot of energy because Arkivum's channels have suddenly got to shift a lot more product into new markets and his channels have got to do it, or else some CV polishing might be in order. Way to go Steve. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like