Gillware, Inc.

History and Founding

Gillware was founded in 2004 by brothers Brian and Tyler Gill after Tyler experienced a costly hard drive failure while in college, leading them to identify a gap in affordable data recovery services. Starting in a basement in Madison, Wisconsin, the company has grown into a global leader in data recovery and digital forensics. The founders' hands-on engineering background drives the company's technical focus.

Services and Specialization

Gillware offers a comprehensive range of services including hard drive recovery for mechanical drives with physical damage such as beeping or clicking, flash recovery for SSDs and USB drives, RAID recovery for failed arrays even with multiple drive failures, and virtual server recovery for corrupted VMFS volumes from hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V. Additionally, the company provides digital forensics, incident response, e-discovery, and a remote backup solution to prevent future data loss. Their emergency data recovery service prioritizes urgent cases with after-hours engineering and expedited turnaround.

Technology and Cleanroom

The company operates an ISO-5 Class 100 clean room lab and employs a team of computer scientists, electrical engineers, and mechanical engineers with over 200,000 combined hours of professional recovery experience. Gillware has developed proprietary software called Hombre and custom hardware tools to handle advanced cases such as helium-filled drives and QLC NAND. Continuous research and development allows them to adapt to new storage technologies and maintain a high success rate.

Market Position and Partnerships

Gillware has been repeatedly recognized as the number one data recovery laboratory by TopTenReviews and holds an 'A' rating with the Better Business Bureau. The company is a member of IDEMA and has been recommended by VMware for virtual recovery. They partner with other data recovery labs that refer complex cases, and recently announced a partnership with RepairTech to offer a 25% discount on TechSuite subscriptions to their partner network. Gillware serves a diverse clientele from individual consumers to U.S. government agencies and healthcare institutions.

Customer Experience

Gillware pioneered the 'no data, no charge' pricing model, providing free evaluation and complimentary inbound shipping within the continental U.S. Quotes are provided after evaluation, with typical turnaround of 4 to 5 days and 1 to 2 days for emergency service. The company handles over 100 new cases per week and has recovered data from over 100,000 failed hard disks. Their Madison facility processes thousands of cases annually, reflecting strong trust and recurring business among customers.