Friday, April 23, 2010

FILEminimizer is focused on PowerPoint, Word and Excel files as well as most common image file types. They’ve developed a technology for further compressing .jpeg images, which is ‘optically loss-less’, meaning you can’t detect it with the naked eye. They also have an application-aware process by which they can correct ‘user errors’ within files, reducing file sizes by optimizing data objects and removing redundancies of these objects in the file.

For example, if you have cut and pasted an image into an Office document it’s often inserted as a .TIF or some other graphics file type, with a higher resolution (and larger size) than is needed. FILEminimizer will change this image to a compressed format or apply its own image compression to the object and adjust the size and resolution as needed. Another example is if you have the same image in your presentation more than once, like a company logo, it will ‘deduplicate’ this image and eliminate the redundancy. Some applications, like PowerPoint, can do a similar image referencing but this feature is handled autonomously within FILEminimizer, so you don’t need MS Office to perform the compression.

The result can be a significant and native reduction in the size of these types of documents. Also, FILEminimizer doesn’t affect other reduction processes like deduplication. On a recent balesio test of 40,000 files, FILEminimizer achieved the following file size reductions:

PowerPoint: ~ 75-85%

Word: ~ 65-80%

Excel: ~ 45-50%

Images: ~ 80-90%

Considering the fact that we speak to storage managers everyday that are dealing with TBs of Office productivity data, this product can save significant storage space. It’s also important to consider that MS Office files are the most often emailed data type. That means this up to 90% reduction will help email stores and the bandwidth needed when emailing files.

FILEminimizer is $1,999 per server being scanned, so the price seems reasonable, given the potential payoff in saved storage, improved performance and reduced bandwidth. When considering the capacity savings and ease of dealing with a native file format, this seems to be an ideal add-on for anyone dealing with large PowerPoint, Word, Excel and images files. That should cover all of us.

George Crump, Senior Analyst