VIA: The Virtual Index Architecture

Behind every world-changing solution lies a well-designed architecture.

Ours is called VIA, the Virtual Index Architecture™, and it does the things good architectures ought to do: it defines the structure, the framework and the logic of our ecosystem, so that we and our partners can build great products that improve any company's Return on Knowledge

Core Principles
VIA is build on a set of principles that make it a uniquely powerful solution for taming data sprawl. The premise behind VIA is simple: to deliver pre-integrated, packaged software that makes it easy to find your data and put it to work.

Non-disruptive
Creating a Universal Index for your enterprise is not the same as building yet another massive data warehouse. In fact, it's quite the opposite. VIA leaves content where it naturally lives, working across all apps and platforms seamlessly. No manual tagging. No ripping and replacing. Just plug and play.

Optimized for virtual environments
VIA is based on a distributed architecture that's a perfect match for virtual environments. It's a hugely scalable approach that parallelizes the indexing processes and spreads the load across multiple machines.

The entire system can dynamically 'fan out' to run workloads on any number of virtual machines to maximize throughput when the demands are greatest, then collapse back to one machine to minimize footprint when things slow down. And you can use your standard virtual machine tools to configure and manage it all. The virtual design means VIA is high-performance, flexible and manageable to a degree never seen before.

Location independent
Cloud computing is changing the way enterprises manage information. VIA was designed from the ground up to easily integrate any cloud-based app or data store. To us, a cloud app is just another app. When your app moves to the cloud, we move right along with it.

Security integrated
Indexing is all about information access. So security can't be laid on as a veneer; it has to be built into the very foundations of the architecture. VIA does this with a plug-in approach that leverages the authentication and authorization you already have in place.

Data extensible
Data never stops evolving. VIA is built from the ground up to embrace the new - including new applications, databases and file formats. Our Cross-Indexers make it easy for VIA to reach into data schemas that haven't even been invented yet.

Device agnostic
We're not all sitting at Wintel machines any more. VIA recognizes this by leveraging the native features of any platform including Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and beyond. So any user and any device can harness the power of the Universal Index.

These are the core principles at the very heart of the Universal Index Architecture. Now let's look at what is means in the real world.

How VIA works