Remote Storage Provider Digitiliti Adds Structure To Unstructured Data

Digitiliti launched its channel program as a way to make it easier for solution provides to reach midsize and enterprise business customers, said Ken Peters, executive vice president of the St. Paul, Minn.-based company.

Digitiliti currently offers two services to solution providers and their customers.

The first, DigiBAK Enterprise Online Data Protection and Backup, currently has over 800 customers who are storing about one billion files in the company’s remote data vault, Peters said.

The second, the DigiLIBE Virtual Corporate Library, is aimed specifically at capturing, managing, controlling, and providing access to unstructured data such as video and images, he said.

“We’re adding structure to unstructured data,” he said. “We add the kind of services provided for structured data, including capture, store, dedupe, compression, policies, and archiving.”

DigiLIBE works by capturing the metadata associated with the content at the time it is created to let that content be organized according to its context for storage, archiving, and retrieval, Peters said. As the data changes, DigiLIBE continues to collect and take advantage of more metadata.

“Once you understand the content of the data, you can understand the content, can access it, write apps for it, and add business intelligence,” he said.

For example, a telco’s customer might be a mother who wants to share data with her children while controlling access to prevent that data from being sent elsewhere. So the telco could provide an application that notifies the mother if a child tries to send that data in an email.

In another example, Peters said medical personnel could collect data for electronic records, but would need apps to analyze and access that data.

In both cases, the applications require information on the data, which is what DigiLIBE provides.

DigiLIBE, which was quietly released in March, already has two OEMs and 15 business partners working with the technology. However, Peters said, Digitiliti wants to expand the partner base for DigiLIBE and DigiBAK to include a wider range of partners.

Such partners include solution providers who could offer customers with specific solutions, strategic consulting partners and managed service providers who could help customers with setting up and using their data store, and OEMs, he said.

For such partners, Digitiliti is providing a combined lead generation and deal registration program, as well as the ability to demonstrate the service over the Internet as part of a proof-of-concept, he said.

Solution providers interested in DigiBAK and DigiLIBE require a strong understanding of the value proposition of the offerings, and must demonstrate consulting experience in Web and SQL environments, Peters said.

For consultants and MSPs, Digitiliti already has the back office part of the business in place, and can provide them a white-label appliance they can deploy at the customer’s sites, he said.