Tim Williams

Founder & CEO Index Engines

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Tim Williams is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Index Engines, a data management and cybersecurity software company he started in 2003 and has run without outside investment ever since. The company’s flagship product, CyberSense, examines backup data for the statistical fingerprints of ransomware corruption, and its commercial significance comes less from direct sales than from OEM arrangements: Dell Technologies, IBM, and Infinidat embed the technology inside their own data protection offerings. Williams is a three-time storage-industry founder and operator, having previously built CrosStor Software and sold it to EMC in 2000, and having stepped in as interim CEO to turn around Tacit Networks before its 2006 sale to Packeteer.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Index Engines since 2003, built to roughly 100 employees and more than 1,500 clients while remaining self-funded with no external investment.
• Creator of CyberSense, which analyzes over 200 content-based indicators of ransomware corruption and is licensed through OEM partnerships with Dell Technologies, IBM, and Infinidat.
• Founder, Chairman and CEO of CrosStor Software from 1990 until its sale to EMC in 2000; afterward served as EMC’s VP of storage operating systems for the mid-range division.
• Led an angel investor group to restart Tacit Networks in 2001 and served as interim CEO through its turnaround, ahead of its 2006 acquisition by Packeteer.
• Former Bell Labs engineer, holder of an MS in Computer Science from NYU’s Courant Institute, and an active angel investor.

Professional Journey

Williams began his career as an engineer at Bell Labs, and holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. In 1990 he founded CrosStor Software, a storage software company he bootstrapped and led as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for a decade. EMC acquired CrosStor in 2000, and Williams stayed on for a period as EMC’s Vice President of storage operating systems for its mid-range division.

In 2001 he took on a different kind of problem: Tacit Networks, a company whose technology was sound but whose business model was not working. Williams led a group of angel investors to restart it, refocusing the technology, reinventing the business model, attracting new institutional investors, and rebuilding the management team, then serving as interim CEO until a permanent replacement was recruited. That turnaround ended in an acquisition by Packeteer in 2006.

He founded Index Engines in 2003 around the problem of making the contents of backup data searchable, scanning backup tapes and disk repositories to index content and extract both online and offline data. That indexing capability turned out to have a second, more valuable application. Because Index Engines could read inside backups at the content level, it could also detect when that content had been silently altered, which is what a ransomware attack looks like in a backup set before anyone notices. The result was CyberSense, which uses machine-learning models across more than 200 content-based indicators to distinguish ordinary change from encryption-driven corruption, and which the company reports identifies corruption with 99.99% accuracy.

That product reshaped the company’s commercial model. Rather than competing for direct enterprise sales against far larger vendors, Index Engines licensed CyberSense into their products, striking OEM relationships with Dell Technologies, IBM, and Infinidat, alongside a channel partner network. The company has stayed deliberately independent, remaining self-funded with no external investment while growing to roughly 100 employees serving over 1,500 clients across financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, from a Holmdel, New Jersey headquarters with additional offices in Colorado Springs, San Jose, and Pune, India. Williams remains an active angel investor and writes on data security as a contributor to SC Media.

Education

New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

MS, Computer Science