How can I find my files? Bring file order from chaos

The Big Picture: Finding files is a hassle. Where did I store that file? What directory, what folder, what storage location, what cloud, what location? In this brief video, learn how Cloudtenna catalogs file activity...and machine learning, to help provide intelligent navigation to the files you use and need. Very cool and much needed.

Transcript:

Mike Matchett:                  Hi. I'm Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data, and today we're going to talk about what's new in files and, particularly, finding your files, making use of them, getting productive with your files. I, personally, as I was just talking a while ago, have files on my laptop. I have files on one, or two, or maybe a half dozen cloud storage services. I've got files scattered everywhere, files on client systems, files in my email, files in my Evernote, files all over the place. If I want to find a file, I am searching six, seven, eight times to get there, to get and look for it.

                                                      Today, we have a company that's just coming out of stealth with a great new product and it's going to help me and everybody else find their files and do some great things with them. This is Cloudtenna. This is Aaron Ganek. Welcome to the show. You're founder and CEO of Cloudtenna. Tell us, as you're coming out here, what was your motivating purpose in doing this? What was the problem you saw in the market and said, "I have to go solve this file problem?"

Aaron Ganek:                       Cloudtenna is bringing order to file chaos. Files have become scattered across many, many different repositories, kind of how you just mentioned. An employee at a company uses eight to 10 different repositories and apps through their daily workflow. Some files get uploaded to on-premises file servers. They might also use cloud storage, maybe something like Microsoft OneDrive, and then Saas applications like Salesforce and Slack.

Mike Matchett:                  I didn't even-

Aaron Ganek:                       With files scattered across all of those places, it's become an absolute mess to keep track of all of that activity. Cloudtenna catalogs this file activity across all these disparate data silos, and then we provide some pretty cool machine learning services to help companies mitigate that chaos.

Mike Matchett:                  Right. You do what people might expect. If you told me about you were cataloging my files, you'd go and you get all the metadata, and you parse up, and you index it. But the cool thing is you do it across, like you said, the SaaS services, the on-prem services, I'm probably missing the five or six things there, but multi-cloud, definitely cross-cloud, and then you don't just provide that indexing engine. You're actually providing live updates to that. You're actually providing the place I would go to do my search, get sub-second response time, like a personal Google for my files within a company.

Aaron Ganek:                       Yes. Yeah, well, we're really focused on unstructured data. We want to provide a productivity use case. Productivity has two factors to it. Number one is when I do a file search, I want to be able to see search results very quickly. I don't want it to take a minute to return or even an hour or a day. I need to be able to see results in sub-second times.

                                                      I also need to be able to see files in my search results that were edited recently. If I'm talking about productivity, the files that I touched earlier today or yesterday, are far more important than the files that I touched a year ago, so our ability for the system to be lightweight enough that we can scan all of your repositories and pick up files in near realtime to show up in search results.

Mike Matchett:                  This is not necessarily a personal productivity tool, as we were talking. You've got full ACL controls still baked in. You do full personalization, but within the corporate security realm. A company would adopt this and each person within the company gets a personalized experience, but they're still within their security regime. Right?

Aaron Ganek:                       Absolutely. We apply full ACLs, which means that as an end-user does a file search, they can only see files that they have permissions to view. But each user is going to get a personalized search result. That means that we are going to rank using our machine learning, and an understanding of how that user has accessed files in the past, and how their team members have accessed files in the past. We're going to rank the files that you need to make sure they come up at the top of the search result.

                                                      This even extends a little bit further. Something I like to talk about is that as I type a search, we have typeahead, much like you would see in Google, but even that typeahead is personalized to you. If there are keywords that we will see in files that you have access to, but someone else in your company doesn't have permissions to view, those keywords will not come up with typeahead for that other user.

Mike Matchett:                  What I found most interesting when you open the hood and look inside is this is not simply based on looking at all the files and creating a big search index, so you can do term search, but you've got a file usage graph. You've got a user graph. When we say graphs, we're talking about the kinds of things, a Facebook graph, where there's webs and connectivities. This person knows that person, knows that person. This document is related to that document, related to that document, because the same person used it, and so on. You're actually then learning those patterns of behavior to personalize the search result, which is a great thing, I think. I think it's going to give some people some really surprising emergent behavior, as we talked about.

Aaron Ganek:                       Absolutely. When trying to understand who's on what team, we found that that is particularly important, and who has access files to your own search results. The first thing we did was said, "Okay, well, let's go look at active directory, and let's look at the marketing group, and then we'll give search results based off of that." We found that the active directory tends to be a lot out-of-date.

                                                      A much better way for us to understand how you work with other people inside your company will be to look at your file activity history. If you frequently access the same set of files as another employee in your company, you likely work very closely with them, and we're able to use that data in connection to information about the files themselves to provide better search results.

Mike Matchett:                  Yeah, you guys should be named something like Chaos Killer, right, rather than Cloudtenna.

Aaron Ganek:                       I like that. We're going to hire you in our marketing department.

Mike Matchett:                  Yeah. I look forward to that. I know we didn't have a lot of time today to get your announcement, your coming out. Where can we find more information on this?

Aaron Ganek:                       Certainly, you can go to cloudtenna.com. We hope to be able to provide information. There will be a sign-up for our beta there, which we are very excited for people to get their hands on very soon.

Mike Matchett:                  And scale that. Well, thank you very much, Aaron. I look forward to really hearing more about this and diving under the hood as soon as you guys get public a little bit more and can tell us a little bit more about it. Thanks for being on the show.

Aaron Ganek:                       A pleasure. Great to meet you and thank you for having me.

Mike Matchett:                  Thank you for watching. Come back again. I'm sure we're going to have more coverage of Cloudtenna. Take care, guys.

Aaron Ganek:                       Bye-bye.

Mike Matchett:                  Bye. Hi. I'm Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data, and today we're going to talk about what's new in files and, particularly, finding your files, making use of them, getting productive with your files. I, personally, as I was just talking a while ago, have files on my laptop. I have files on one, or two, or maybe a half dozen cloud storage services. I've got files scattered everywhere, files on client systems, files in my email, files in my Evernote, files all over the place. If I want to find a file, I am searching six, seven, eight times to get there, to get and look for it.

                                                      Today, we have a company that's just coming out of stealth with a great new product and it's going to help me and everybody else find their files and do some great things with them. This is Cloudtenna. This is Aaron Ganek. Welcome to the show. You're founder and CEO of Cloudtenna. Tell us, as you're coming out here, what was your motivating purpose in doing this? What was the problem you saw in the market and said, "I have to go solve this file problem?"

Aaron Ganek:                       Cloudtenna is bringing order to file chaos. Files have become scattered across many, many different repositories, kind of how you just mentioned. An employee at a company uses eight to 10 different repositories and apps through their daily workflow. Some files get uploaded to on-premises file servers. They might also use cloud storage, maybe something like Microsoft OneDrive, and then Saas applications like Salesforce and Slack.

Mike Matchett:                  I didn't even-

Aaron Ganek:                       With files scattered across all of those places, it's become an absolute mess to keep track of all of that activity. Cloudtenna catalogs this file activity across all these disparate data silos, and then we provide some pretty cool machine learning services to help companies mitigate that chaos.

Mike Matchett:                  Right. You do what people might expect. If you told me about you were cataloging my files, you'd go and you get all the metadata, and you parse up, and you index it. But the cool thing is you do it across, like you said, the SaaS services, the on-prem services, I'm probably missing the five or six things there, but multi-cloud, definitely cross-cloud, and then you don't just provide that indexing engine. You're actually providing live updates to that. You're actually providing the place I would go to do my search, get sub-second response time, like a personal Google for my files within a company.

Aaron Ganek:                       Yes. Yeah, well, we're really focused on unstructured data. We want to provide a productivity use case. Productivity has two factors to it. Number one is when I do a file search, I want to be able to see search results very quickly. I don't want it to take a minute to return or even an hour or a day. I need to be able to see results in sub-second times.

                                                      I also need to be able to see files in my search results that were edited recently. If I'm talking about productivity, the files that I touched earlier today or yesterday, are far more important than the files that I touched a year ago, so our ability for the system to be lightweight enough that we can scan all of your repositories and pick up files in near realtime to show up in search results.

Mike Matchett:                  This is not necessarily a personal productivity tool, as we were talking. You've got full ACL controls still baked in. You do full personalization, but within the corporate security realm. A company would adopt this and each person within the company gets a personalized experience, but they're still within their security regime. Right?

Aaron Ganek:                       Absolutely. We apply full ACLs, which means that as an end-user does a file search, they can only see files that they have permissions to view. But each user is going to get a personalized search result. That means that we are going to rank using our machine learning, and an understanding of how that user has accessed files in the past, and how their team members have accessed files in the past. We're going to rank the files that you need to make sure they come up at the top of the search result.

                                                      This even extends a little bit further. Something I like to talk about is that as I type a search, we have typeahead, much like you would see in Google, but even that typeahead is personalized to you. If there are keywords that we will see in files that you have access to, but someone else in your company doesn't have permissions to view, those keywords will not come up with typeahead for that other user.

Mike Matchett:                  What I found most interesting when you open the hood and look inside is this is not simply based on looking at all the files and creating a big search index, so you can do term search, but you've got a file usage graph. You've got a user graph. When we say graphs, we're talking about the kinds of things, a Facebook graph, where there's webs and connectivities. This person knows that person, knows that person. This document is related to that document, related to that document, because the same person used it, and so on. You're actually then learning those patterns of behavior to personalize the search result, which is a great thing, I think. I think it's going to give some people some really surprising emergent behavior, as we talked about.

Aaron Ganek:                       Absolutely. When trying to understand who's on what team, we found that that is particularly important, and who has access files to your own search results. The first thing we did was said, "Okay, well, let's go look at active directory, and let's look at the marketing group, and then we'll give search results based off of that." We found that the active directory tends to be a lot out-of-date.

                                                      A much better way for us to understand how you work with other people inside your company will be to look at your file activity history. If you frequently access the same set of files as another employee in your company, you likely work very closely with them, and we're able to use that data in connection to information about the files themselves to provide better search results.

Mike Matchett:                  Yeah, you guys should be named something like Chaos Killer, right, rather than Cloudtenna.

Aaron Ganek:                       I like that. We're going to hire you in our marketing department.

Mike Matchett:                  Yeah. I look forward to that. I know we didn't have a lot of time today to get your announcement, your coming out. Where can we find more information on this?

Aaron Ganek:                       Certainly, you can go to cloudtenna.com. We hope to be able to provide information. There will be a sign-up for our beta there, which we are very excited for people to get their hands on very soon.

Mike Matchett:                  And scale that. Well, thank you very much, Aaron. I look forward to really hearing more about this and diving under the hood as soon as you guys get public a little bit more and can tell us a little bit more about it. Thanks for being on the show.

Aaron Ganek:                       A pleasure. Great to meet you and thank you for having me.

Mike Matchett:                  Thank you for watching. Come back again. I'm sure we're going to have more coverage of Cloudtenna. Take care, guys.

Aaron Ganek:                       Bye-bye.

Mike Matchett:                  Bye.