The Expedite Story
by CEO Bruce Thompson
I've been in the storage industry long enough to find myself with a consulting practice. As a storage consultant, I’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of companies in the storage industry. (I stopped counting after one hundred.) Such exposure led me to the realization that the solutions people were working on were missing the mark with customers. Why? The storage people were very smart, worked hard, and generated solid, high quality products. Then why were we still having issues? One area in particular concerns storing infrequently accessed files on robotic storage libraries. We, as an industry, have created countless products over the last few decades but none have really taken off. Why? After being asked to work on roughly my 6th version of such a product I said enough is enough. Something is wrong at the core.
With nothing more than a hunch and a pile of tenacity, my team and I started down the path of discovery. We really didn't know where it was going to go so attempting to do this through a large storage company or even through venture capital investment was out of the question. We just had to do this on our own.
After ten years of work, over 1000 releases of the software, and untold hours sitting with customers to prove out the concepts, we finally arrived at the world’s first information asset management system.
We are proud of the fact that we didn’t have to modify any applications, operating systems, storage protocols, storage devices, or anything else to produce such a breakthrough system.
By approaching the unstructured data management problem from a business perspective, we actually managed to identify and implement a new storage model, one that is more closely tied to the business use of the information. This new definition of unstructured data removes a large number of limitations restricting the current day use of storage.
- Bruce
"We are proud of the fact that we didn’t have to modify any applications, operating systems, storage protocols, storage devices, or anything else to produce such a breakthrough system."
Founded in 2004, AIS is privately held and headquartered in Golden, Colorado.
Bruce Thompson
CEO & Founder
Bruce Thompson is a 30 year veteran of the storage industry and a serial entrepreneur. After spending the first 10 years of his career at Hewlett-Packard, he worked at, created, and managed various storage startup companies and then became a storage consultant focused on the technical and strategic aspects of unstructured data. After working with over 100 companies, it became apparent there was an underlying problem with the approach storage was taking in the area of unstructured data. Bruce formed Action Information Systems in 2004 and has spent the last 10 years creating Expedite, its software product focused on solving the root cause of the unstructured data problems. Bruce has a BA in computer engineering as well as an MBA and holds several storage patents.
