Ayfie’s Journey Towards the Cloud
What was previously referred to as Enterprise Search is now moving towards Insight Engine as these solutions combine classic search with AI to deliver actionable insights derived from the connected data sources, e.g. fileserver, database, websites, SharePoint, email, CRM, and other critical applications and systems spanning from accounting to very niche manufacturing and project management systems, and make this data available in one platform.
This is the Ayfie Platform, moving into a new chapter of technology offerings.
Ayfie's history
Ayfie has since its birth, with InfoFinder and VirtualWorks (who acquired the former in 2006) and later became Ayfie Group in 2018, always worked with technology solutions to collect and analyse data in various forms and ways. In a fast-moving world of cloud-based solutions and integrations across existing and new architecture it can be difficult for users, organizations, and businesses to extract the information they know is right there, at their fingertips, without having implemented the right AI-driven technology and solutions. It is exactly this problem Ayfie solves across the value chain.
Going forward, Ayfie will make it easier for new and existing customers to implement and utilize its solutions. At the core of this strategy, we focus on developing best of breed cloud solutions for the future. One building block on this cloud journey has been to replace the monolithic architecture of our platform with a microservice architecture, using Docker, the world’s leading software containerization platform. For tech savvy users this has several advantages such as reducing complexity of the service, less risk for deployment of new changes and ensures easier maintenance with incremental updates.
For the rest and most of the end users, i.e. you and me, this means a lot for how fast our needs and requests are taken into consideration and actually visible in the system, app or solution we are using. Things have never happened faster, and vendors and providers of technology solutions are able to meet the expectations of their costumers as such an impressive pace.
So, now that the foundation of Ayfie’s product platform is ready for new modern services - what now and what is next?
Premium and freemium strategies for future cloud growth
A part of our strategy is to make it even easier for new and existing customers to try out our portfolio of leading business and data gathering solutions. On the way to a more developed cloud offering, we are therefore launching the API services where we address a much narrower and more specific user group of developers and citizen developers. For the time being our APIs are available in an alpha/beta version on our developer portal, where you need to register to get the API keys. It is a free of charge service we offer with the purpose of getting to know both the API and marketplace cloud space as well as the potential that lies behind each service.
We believe that by combining the knowledge we have in the data and information field with feedback from our client’s users and the developers on the new API functionality, we will have even better and more unique functionality available later this year. An example is Ayfie’s unique functionality for specific classification of data and information. If you are conducting a due diligence related to an acquisition, and you need to identify all or specific memos, customer contracts or employee agreements, we can offer you an easy and clever way of identifying all documents by telling our AI solution what you are looking for by uploading a few documents or by indicating what kind of information you are looking for across various documents. Similar functionality can be utilized within healthcare to see if patients are treated in the best manner based on information which is made available in journals or other sources of documentation.
This can also be utilized across how a municipality is operating with a focus on creating even better user experience and added value through access to data and information. These are just a few examples of how our unique technology and functionality can create value.
Summarized: what Ayfie is doing
The Ayfie Platform will be an evolution of search technologies that provide on-demand and proactive knowledge discovery and exploration augmented by semantic and machine learning (ML) technologies. They typically create a new index by crawling, indexing, and mining both internal and external data sources, as well as structured and unstructured content, to ensure that a broad set of information is easily discoverable.
We are leaping into a set of opportunities while at the same time acknowledging it takes time to create a leading software and services company within our market. The strategy now is to include premium and freemium - for a limited number of data sets or documents - to make it easy and convenient for developers and others to test our services and process flow. It is important to remember that most enterprises have, on average, only about 20-40 percent of their workloads in the cloud, most of which are the easier, less complex ones. At the same time, nearly 2/3 say they haven’t achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives so far. On top of this, the pandemic has created an unprecedented wake-up call for many enterprises with a need of understanding how they can access and utilize the data and information they know are there but cannot access.
Organizations in every industry have had a very powerful and direct reminder of the importance of systems resilience, agility, adapt- ability and scalability. We want to help our clients to get as much value out of all the data residing in their applications and systems. And the way to do that is hybrid, constantly changing and extremely exciting!
Stay tuned and don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a chat or coffee.