What’s in a name?

Some may claim that my co-founder Florian and I simply enjoy rebranding companies on a regular basis. To a certain extent, that’s true. “There’s magic in every beginning” and a new name and look capture that spirit of optimism. When we built the “ayfie” brand in 2016 - as a successor to the slightly ambiguous “VirtualWorks” - we also tried to do just that: Move away from enterprise search to a product for high-volume eDiscovery projects; move away from technology-centric to solution-centric messaging.

For our own brand, it is somewhat similar. Until recently, we were called “searchgears” in order to show that we provide all those little gear pieces needed to make a search solution truly great, in a manufactured quality and bespoke way: from front-end to data preparation, from “query suggest” to marketing. This focus appealed primarily to customers who had very clear ideas about what they wanted to do with their content and just needed technological support to turn that vision into reality.

However, in our discussions with current and future business partners, it is apparent again and again that this type of customer tends to be a minority. The majority is aware of having a problem with textual data, but does not yet have a clear idea of how to solve it. Search engines surprisingly often end up being part of such a solution, but never the only one and often not even the essential one.

In reality, this has long been our self-image, and now brand optics are following suit: We do whatever it takes to bring new movement (new motion) into big data piles. To find the needle in the haystack, you first have to get the haystack into shape. This is the goal of our products and services which we will be launching here in the next few months.

To pass the time, we will regularly disclose here what we have learned in 20 years in the “search business”.