Peter Baumann, CEO of ActiveNav, explains how his software helps organizations manage unstructured data like email and PowerPoint files that live outside traditional databases. He's based in Northern Virginia and leads the firm that tackles a growing problem for enterprises and government agencies.
Peter Baumann, welcome. Thanks for spending a few minutes. I'll stipulate that you and I have worked together recently. We, we teamed up to develop a strategic narrative for your company, ActiveNav, but I don't want to talk about that yet. First, I'd like you to just introduce yourself and talk about your company and what your role is.
Yeah, sure, Bob. Good to see you again. So my name is Peter Baumann. I'm the chief executive of ActiveNav. Obviously British origin, but I've been based in the US now, Northern Virginia, for nearly 8 years. And we're a software company to enable customers to deal with this huge problem of too much data, and specifically too much unstructured data. Unstructured data, for those who, who aren't in the know, is largely data that sits outside of databases. So all that stuff that we are creating and trying to review and then be inundated with every day, whether it's email, PowerPoint, Excel, about 2,500 different types of data.
Let's say I'm a board member. I'm not a technical person, but I'm a board member of a significant company that makes heavy use of data of all types, maybe Fortune 500 or a large government agency. Why do I care about this? Why is this even a problem?
Oh yeah, this is a good question there, Bob. Thank you. You care on a number of fronts. The kind of more important drivers today, which are around risk, security. Here we're talking about in the advent of a breach, you don't want the hacker or the intruder, if you like, to find the wrong information. What I mean by the wrong information, if they find information that that's core to your business activity, then that's bad news. But it's potentially not as bad as the reputational damage of them finding information that isn't core to your business that has been left out there. And so you should only be preserving the content and data that you need to preserve for the appropriate period of time. And so security risk, sensitivity of data is super important. You're going to care about the cost of all this data sloshing around, whether it's just good old cost of storage, which is less of a thing with cloud. However, cloud is extremely expensive when you want to draw the content back down. Whether it's the cost of the infrastructure, if you're— you've got too much data syncing up across a small pipe, maybe globally or nationwide, that can be quite costly. So the kind of efficiency side
