Panzura and Avail Partnering

Panzura, Inc. announced a partnership with AVAIL Solutions, Inc., a digital content management platform for building professionals, to help distributed design teams deliver quality Building Information Modeling (BIM) projects faster and with more predictable outcomes.

The companies’ joint solution, announced at Autodesk University, introduces an integration between AVAIL, Panzura Freedom and Vizion.ai. The integration unifies data silos across the organization into one global cloud file system, and enables team members to collaborate using a single source of truth to data. 

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When AVAIL’s visually aesthetic content management system is combined with Panzura’s cloud file system, team members can access graphics-intensive design content in seconds, irrespective of geography and file sizes. In addition, multiple team members can work on the same data sets or the same file at the same time, if that application supports it, from discrete locations without fears of collisions, overrides, or versions being lost in the system. Low latency results in improved productivity for the entire team. 

In turn, AVAIL’s approach to virtualizing thumbnail images allows designers to browser massive libraries with little or no latency across any network, LAN, WAN or cloud. Previously, this process was so painful as to make visual browsing impossible.

Vizion.ai allows file search, monitoring and audit through one single dashboard, regardless of the cloud in which files are located. Its log analytics include a built-in dashboard for Autodesk’s Revit 3D collaborative CAD application, allowing specific views over what Revit files teams are working on.

Randall Stevens, CEO, AVAIL, said: “As the sophistication levels of BIM design tools reach new heights, the end product and massive amounts of embedded data remain siloed, anchored to individual software and hidden within an office or project. Panzura, when bundled with AVAIL, unifies content silos into one global cloud file system with greater transparency and support for collaborative workflows that drive consistent, high-quality design outcomes.“

Jason C. McKinney, SVP alliances and channel, Panzura, said: “The cloud is often billed as offering freedom to AEC professionals to collaborate together from anywhere, but conventional cloud storage technology is actually having the opposite effect – it’s stifling collaboration and productivity and racking up long-term harm to unsuspecting businesses. When AVAIL’s solution is combined with Panzura’s global data file system, team members worldwide can access graphics-intensive files of any size ins and work collaboratively on the same data sets or in some cases even the same file. Very low latency results in improved productivity and better outcomes for the entire team.“

AVAIL and Panzura as-a-service cloud solutions facilitate real-world collaboration and position AEC firms for accelerated growth through increased productivity:

• Search engine and data visualization capabilities eliminate time wasted searching endlessly for information, recreating work that can’t be found, or worse, reusing work that’s defective.
• Near instantaneous file retrieval: Users can access any file in seconds, rather than minutes, including bandwidth-intensive files, irrespective of their size, geographic location, or date last accessed.
• Data insights and transparency helps drive IT decisions that eliminate scale and performance bottlenecks.