Connections

By Ian Hamilton, Chief Technology Officer, Signiant –

To succeed in today’s competitive world, tech companies must continually innovate. One indicator of a company’s innovation abilities? The patents it holds.

In the case of Signiant, we hold numerous patents—ten currently. Some of these originate from our first generation of on-premises accelerated file transfer solutions, namely ones relating to our Manager+Agents product.

Manager+Agents is still considered the gold standard within large media enterprises for the automated, scheduled transport of large files between geographically dispersed locations. Those original patents cover areas, such as… A method for transferring data across high latency firewalled networks (U.S. Patents 7526557 & 8667145); A process of transferring data using a centralized manager (U.S. Patent 7343301); A cross-platform security model for data transfer (U.S. Patent 7152108)

The patents above represent the first phase of Signiant’s technical innovation. In 2012, we launched Media Shuttle, our cloud-native SaaS solution for person-initiated file transfers. Two years later, we released Flight, our cloud-native auto-scaling SaaS utility for fast and secure transfer of large data sets into and out of the cloud.

With almost every media tech vendor offering cloud-based products (or “cloud-enabled” versions of legacy products), it’s easy to assume that porting solutions to the cloud is simply a case of “me too” copycatting. With many vendors, this is indeed true, and a large number of these cloud offerings are actually “cloud-washed” rather than “cloud-native” solutions.

In the case of both Media Shuttle and Flight, however, the design and development of these first-of-their-kind solutions required significant innovation that resulted in additional patents. These include a hybrid SaaS method for secure cloud-based file sharing (U.S. Patents 8930475, 9596216 & 9830330) and a system for load-balancing cloud-based accelerated transfer servers for moving files in and out of cloud object storage (U.S. Patent 9032081).

But the innovations don’t stop there.

In 2017, Signiant was awarded two new patents relating to our SaaS products (as well two additional patents that expanded earlier claims for the initial Media Shuttle’s patent).

The first new patent is for our “Flight Gateway” accelerated tunneling mechanism that underpins our latest Flight deployment option (U.S. Patent 9614917). This pioneering standards-based architecture brings multi-Gbps speeds to Flight and transparently optimizes any HTTP-based transfer, thereby enabling the use of any client-side software and providing direct access to any cloud service.

The second new patent (U.S. Patent 9692799) is for our CloudSpeX cloud-based file format validation option for Media Shuttle. This patent, for a “system and method for sending and/or receiving digital content based on a delivery specification,” underlies CloudSpeX’s ability to ensure file format specifications are enforced prior to delivery, thereby saving customers significant time and resources.

So, what should patents mean to you?

We realize patents make for dull reading best left to geeks and lawyers. However, if you’re researching vendors, it does make sense to consider the patents the company holds. If nothing else, it will help illuminate who the real leaders are in the space.

That said, an even better indicator of Signiant’s success might be the number, range, and quality of our customers—and the fact that they collectively rely on our products to move petabytes of their valuable content every day.

To learn more about how our patented technology benefits you as part of our solutions, please visit our Product pages.