Tiger now turns to medical imaging
Tiger Technology, a Bulgarian startup that presents cloud-stored files as local documents on a Windows workstation, has found a new growth driver in medical imaging.
“We asked medical scanner manufacturers, including Philips, to implement a module that talks to the API in their products. And suddenly these providers were able to offer cloud measure to their customers. This means that doctors using these scanners in their hospitals can now directly share their images with specialists in other parts of the world,” explains Alexander Lefterov, CEO of Tiger Technology.
“Another interesting point is that these images, which have millions of pixels on each side, must be stored for years, even though they can only hold 2 GB of space each. By backing them up in the cloud, on an inexpensive archiving service, you avoid investing in expensive local storage capacity. »
In this case, Tiger accounts for this cloud storage itself, currently at €5 per TB per month.
Cloud files that work like Windows files
Tiger technology is called Tiger Bridge. It presents file icons on the Windows desktop as if they were stored on a local disk. In fact, these icons are symbolic links to documents hosted in the cloud. The main interest is that the files do not consume disk space on the local machine, provided that they are easily accessible as they are there.
In comparison, Box and other DropBoxes sync local files to a cloud backup, which doesn’t save any storage on the user’s machine. As for online storage services like GDrive or OneDrive, if they don’t store anything on a hard drive, they require you to go through a web interface to access, or rather download, files. This manipulation is not only difficult for the user, but also prevents the direct opening of files from native applications.
Tiger Bride displays an online document as a file that can be directly manipulated by Windows and its programs. The technically interesting point is, first of all, that it knows how to manage some kind of dynamic cache to quickly access the contents of a file. When a document is created and then closed, Tiger Bridge transfers its bytes to the cloud in the background.
When this document is opened again, Tiger Bride breaks it into small pieces. In the case of video, before opening it, it loads not the whole movie, but only the parts that the user is watching, which speeds up the presence on the screen. For huge images from medical scanners, it downloads only the pixels that can be displayed on the screen, then what is needed when the user zooms in.
Practically all medical scanners can store their images on Windows NAS. It is on this NAS that Tiger Bridge is installed. An API that scanner manufacturers are encouraged to use allows their software to ask Tiger Bridge in real-time which pixels to magnify. The restored pixels remain on disk until the image is closed. Or longer according to user-defined level rules.
Target niche markets
Founded in 2005, Tiger currently boasts 10,000 users worldwide. After successfully selling its product to various Bulgarian administrations, including the military, including submarines, the publishing house has achieved some international success with editing and video production studios. Its ambition is to become a fast remote storage specialist for as many vertical sectors as possible.
“Verticals are by definition very specialized and the most difficult to move to the cloud, but they also understand that online storage can allow them to achieve significant savings. Therefore, we come to remove the obstacles in front of them: in this case, the speed and simplicity of access to their data will be lost,” Alexander Lefterov claims.
However, Tiger’s solution has one limitation: it only works from Windows machines. “We have mastered this technology, which makes our product very effective. However, we are regularly asked about Linux and even macOS deployments. We are working on it,” the general director concluded.
