Cloudtenna: Availability of DirectSearch Global File Search Software

Silicon Valley AI software start-up Cloudtenna announced availability of its global file search software DirectSearch and its OEM program, DirectSearch Core.

Users can self-signup for the DirectSearch product. With DirectSearch, enterprise users get a comprehensive AI/machine learning-based search platform that finds files across disparate repositories.

Out of the box, DirectSearch products include connectors to common collaboration tools including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Outlook, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian JIRA and Confluence.

Additional repositories, including hybrid support for on-premises file servers, are coming later this year. Users can find files by name, sender, date, file type, keyword, content, and other attributes regardless of where it is located.

The company’s OEM program, DirectSearch Core, provides developers with easy-to-integrate search infrastructure purpose-built specifically for files.

File search in enterprise environments has been a particularly challenge because search results must reflect complex and ultra-granular file permissions. Building search in this manner has historically been prohibitively difficult to scale and unreasonably expensive. DirectSearch Core overcomes these challenges and helps OEM partners deliver high-performance file search across multiple repositories.

“File search infrastructure faces a unique set of requirements that goes beyond the footprint of traditional search infrastructure used for log-search and site-search,” said Aaron Ganek, CEO, Cloudtenna. “It has to be smart enough to reflect accurate file permissions. It has to be smart enough to derive context to boost search results. It has to do all this in a fraction of second – anything longer and the user thinks search is broken. And it can’t be cost prohibitive.“

The company’s architected DirectSearch to be scalable beyond thousands of employees accessing billions of files across dozens of repositories, and still deliver results in less than a second. It uses real-time binding to build its file index and then performs consistency checks to capture deltas, such as a security change or a deleted file. File deduplication and ACL crunching reduces data required by the index, reducing storage costs and requirements.

“Search is an expensive service for any vendor to add, be it for a storage array or a cloud app, and it affects performance and UX if it’s not engineered correctly,” said Marc Staimer, president, Dragon Slayer Consulting. “These cost and performance problems become magnified as enterprise search needs to consider user and group file permissions and ACLs, but Cloudtenna has purpose-built a search infrastructure to address this gap.“

The market for universal file search has matured in the past few quarters with notable investments and IPOs. OEMs are increasingly looking for search technology built for files, not logs, that they can plug in to their own front-end UI and are easy to license and release to market. Research shows enterprises incur high costs when employees or external customers are unable to find, access, and use information. These costs come from lost productivity – each worker spends an estimated 2.5 hours every day searching for information – but also poor decision-making and lost revenues based on insufficient or missing information.

DirectSearch for enterprise use is available at prices starting at $10/user/month. Users who sign-up before December 1 will receive their first three months free, no credit card required.