SaaS vs. On-premise archiving - the debate rages

During my industry analyst days, I got some perfunctory inquiries on hosted vs. on-premise email archiving. There was clearly some interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS), but there wasn't much of a debate - on-premise archiving was the way to go for 85% of clients. Why? Mainly because they wanted mailbox management for end-user access to email, fast query times for eDiscovery, and the ability to customize the software to their specific needs.

 
 

Disclaimer: I work for an on-premise archiving vendor, so I technically am biased. However, I believe SaaS does have future in the archiving market…it's just not pragmatic today for organizations that want to facilitate end-user access and eDiscovery.

 
 

As Nick Mehta (CEO of LiveOffice and a guy I highly respect) points out in his blog, SaaS archiving does provide the benefit of being up and running faster and cheaper than on-premise archiving. But, there are many functions that SaaS archiving does not provide today:

1. Opportunity to develop internal expertise for advanced queries
   
2. Mailbox management
   
3. Integrated content archive (e.g. file system content, SharePoint)
   
4. Integrated disaster recovery
   
5. Offline access to mail for knowledge workers
   

   Plus, hosted email archiving vendors have a difficult time meeting SLAs (this is know first-hand from my industry analyst experience - it was a huge complaint of users), rely on journaling which puts a huge strain on the email server, and suffer from poor query speeds (some eDiscovery searches take hours to run). Thus, for organizations that need to manage eDiscovery and end-user access to mail, SaaS archiving does not make sense today.
   

   What does make sense is a hybrid solution, where an on-premise archiving product provides mailbox management, message extension, and eDiscovery while the hosted solution becomes a "tier" of storage where mail subject to compliance (e.g. has to be held by a 3rd party) or very long-term retention is sent to the hosted archive.
   

   As always, your thoughts are welcome…SaaS archiving is an emerging market that will certainly continue to cross paths with the on-premise market. At the very least, it will be fun to watch things play out.
   

   Happy 4th of July to all!
   

Best-of-Breed or All-in-One Solution for eDiscovery?

Years ago, those of us in the information management industry used to argue about whether best-of-breed solutions for web content management, document management, records management, and document imaging were better than enterprise content management (ECM) suites. After lots of consolidation, it would appear that the "suite" approach won, but the reality is that most organizations still use best-of-breed products (even if they bought a full ECM suite). Sometimes, bigger isn't always better.

A similar debate rages in the eDiscovery world. There are providers that appear to be a comprehensive, one-stop-shop for all things eDiscovery. While some of the tools out there can actually do incredible things, I believe that a comprehensive solution that addresses all eDiscovery needs is a myth. We vendors are certainly trying to do the right things and provide good products - no question about it. But, customers need best-of-breed solutions in specific areas and will need to mix and match those solutions together based on their (usually very) unique situation.

I find that most large enterprise organizations understand this fairly well. There are times that I sense the overall market beginning to buy into the idea of an "all-in-one" solution (and, in theory, that would provide great value). However, all organizations should keep in mind that today's "comprehensive" solutions:

1.Routinely fail to deliver the promise of true integration and holistic view into every silo of content

2.Decrease the ability to develop and retain requisite technical skills in house to design and operate these solutions

3.Increase cost and risk in the end, and diminish leverage in negotiating software licenses

We've heard this story before, and we'll continue to hear it as consolidation rumors heat up in the eDiscovery market. If I'm a CIO or legal officer at an organization today, I wouldn't put all my eggs in any one vendor's basket. My priorities would be creating pragmatic, role-based retention policies; addressing proactive preservation of high-volume content (read: nightmarish for eDiscovery) like emails, file system content, and desktop/laptop content; and creating the ability to do early-case assessment with a review tool. Your thoughts are welcome…let me know if you agree / disagree.

Making Sense of the Chatter

It's been quite a couple of weeks in the eDiscovery world. FTI bought Attenex for $88 million. EED buys Daticon (anyone else notice that the press release for that didn't have one mention of Xiotech, the company that sold Daticon? I called it back in my analyst days - a mid-tier storage provider should not own an eDiscovery service bureau). Steve D'Alencon leaves Kazeon to take over as CMO of CaseCentral. And, my phone rang several times with contacts from the venture capital world checking in for opinions on companies they are considering investments in. Why all the activity? I get the sense that the eDiscovery market is again at a precipice. Hype began around the time of the amendments to the FRCP - and market size projections have been high - I should know, I did one of them ;-)

 
 

Are the market projections wrong? No, and in fact, I would say the market projections have been conservative. What's been delaying the near-term growth is, first and foremost, the immaturity of the enterprise market when it comes to eDiscovery. For those of us in the market, the ignorance is hard to fathom. Yet, at meeting after meeting, I still hear legal and IT on opposite sides of the fence (and often ignoring the business people that know how best to manage information).

 
 

But, the FRCPs are powerful - and they are driving change. We've been waiting and waiting and waiting for the market to pop. And now, the first signs of a boil emerge. We now sit waiting for the next shoe to drop, and everyone's got an opinion on when and which shoe it will be. I'm interested in hearing yours…

 
 

In the meantime, while all the exciting activity takes place in vendor land - you organizations need pragmatic solutions that address today's pain and can evolve to be a long-term solution. Let me know how I can help you plan that out.

ILM - myth or reality?

The term Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has been around for quite some time. Wikipedia defines it as "the practice of applying certain policies to the effective management of information throughout its useful life. This practice has been used by Records and Information Management (RIM) Professionals for over three decades and had its basis in the management of information in paper or other physical forms (microfilm, negatives, photographs, audio or video recordings and other assets)."

 
 

In recent years, the term ILM was somewhat coopted by EMC to really have more of a storage connotation - basically the movement of information from tier to tier of storage (high-end storage at the beginning of its lifecycle when fast access is critical to low-end storage at the end of the lifecycle when the information likely won't be accessed).

 
 

But since the ILM term was coined, the world has changed significantly. The volume of digital content has exploded, with no end to its growth in site. Instead of formal documents, users now create small bits of frequently-shared information. This creates a challenge in executing ILM…it becomes way too complicated.

 
 

Meanwhile, the FRCP amendments and compliance regulations put organizations on the hook to do their best to manage the lifecycle of all electronically stored information within the enterprise. So, organizations face a Catch-22 - practice ILM or face huge sanctions, right? Well, the outlook is not as dreary as all that. First, the FRCPs call for reasonable and good faith efforts. Is it reasonable to have a 100-step ILM process for every email sent and received within the organization? No. What is reasonable is to have role-based retention policies in place as a good start. Organizations can do that in their archive. For messages that need more advanced records management, orgs can integrate their RM app to manage the messages in-place within the archive. But, the reality is that basic retention management is going to be enough in 95% of all cases (if not 100% of non-government organizations). That's why so many organizations have deployed archiving, while only 12% or so have rolled out enterprise-wide records management apps (an RM app would be a pre-requisite to practicing effective ILM).

 
 

So, is ILM a myth or reality? Pragmatically, it's a myth. But, if you take it down to basic retention management, it can become a reality. Take a good, hard look in the mirror; get your IT staff and legal team together with LOBs and make the right decision - implement role-based retention management for that high-risk content (email, instant messages, file system content), and then start to investigate broader records management as your policies evolve.

More consolidation in eDiscovery space

We all knew it was coming - there are so many vendors out there that message to eDiscovery that there was bound to be a big round of consolidation. Some shots had already been fired over the bow - Kroll bought Engenium, Autonomy bough Zantaz (which had previously bought SteelPoint), Seagate bought MetaLINCS, and Iron Mountain bought Stratify. Yesterday, it was announced that FTI Consulting bought Attenex. To me, this announcement is notable because Attenex has been a brand associated with the new guard of eDiscovery. The company's approach to analytics-driven review really opened eyes to the money that can be saved in the review process by using things like concept search and visual analytics. In that sense, the company was a trailblazer.

 
 

Attenex primarily went to market through service providers - and FTI was one of those channel partners. I would have to believe that the acquisition will negatively affect other channel relationships. But, the real win here is for FTI, who gets good analytics to add to its Ringtail review platform (assuming it integrates the Ringtail and Attenex technology) and gets it at a nice price - in my analyst days, I expected Attenex to sell for $150M (versus the $88M that FTI paid).

 
 

Now, the analytic-driven review market has only two main pure-plays left - Clearwell and Recommind. It's only a matter of time before they get snapped up (HP, IBM?). Meanwhile, archiving companies like Mimosa have the pleasure of partnering with these review players so that we can give our customers the option to seamlessly get data into these platforms without any processing costs (watch for more from Mimosa on this soon).

 
 

Watching the consolidation is fun - what do you think is next? Let me know...

Allowing for free-flowing information while managing compliance / eDiscovery

I'm sitting in a Microsoft Exchange seminar as I type, watching all of the things that information workers can do in their Outlook clients with Exchange 2007. It's fascinating to see what is possible in terms of collaboration through presence awareness, unified communications, and VOIP. What strikes me most is the notion of complete freedom of information sharing. With that freedom, we can increase the velocity at which information travels between the people that need to utilize it. While this is clearly a step forward, someone needs to raise the caution flag, and I guess I'm just the person to do it. Now, I'm not saying that utilizing these technologies is wrong; on the contrary, I believe that rolling these out to information-intensive workers is critical. But, let's learn from the past and make sure we have systems in place to manage that information (in a way that continues to let it flow freely).

 
 

Microsoft partners like Mimosa have built solutions specifically to do just that - allow organizations to best use Microsoft's information worker solutions, but do so in a way that also manages for compliance, eDiscovery readiness, and leaves as little footprint on your Microsoft systems as possible. One of the hotly debated topics is how much of this advanced Microsoft technology, e.g. Unified Communications, is currently being used. I'd love to hear from you - what do you think? Is UCC a concern for now, or for a year or two down the road? How are you approaching managing the user-generated content in your organization for compliance and eDiscovery?

 
 

Hit me up at bmurphy@mimosasystems.com

 
 

From email archiving to eDiscovery to IP Loss Prevention

I came across an interesting blog entry here at eWeek. Looks like my former employer (and still good friend) Forrester Research has released interesting data around email security. What does that have to do with email archiving and eDiscovery, you might ask. Well, maybe not a whole lot at this very second, but there is a convergence between archiving and security - one that will heat up in 2009.

The data point mentioned in the eWeek blog is that 41% of companies are monitoring employee email, a 2% increase over the previous year. The blogger goes on to make a great point of her own - asking why companies would pay people to read the emails when technology like email archiving and eDiscovery can do it? Great question, but the answer may not be what you are expecting me to say…we still need people to look at those emails. In reality, it's the combination of technology and people that will ultimately create good content governance.

Today, technology alone cannot tell you if an employee is violating and email policy (or, just as importantly, a network file share policy like no price lists on public shares). But, it can proactively alert a supervisor that there is a potential violation and have the supervisor review the content in question. At Mimosa, our Content Monitoring Option is what serves this purpose. It allows organizations to create alerts across all archived content (e.g. email and file system) so that supervisors can govern that policy is followed.

NOTE: the first step is to make sure you actually have policies; too many organizations do not. As we continue to become an economy driven by information in the form of intellectual property (IP), technology to help us ensure we don't lose it (or let competitors get it) will become increasingly important. Because email is the communication method of choice, monitoring it is key - why not do that with the same platform you use for archiving and eDiscovery? It's cost-effective and it's doable - it's a platform, after all.

My call: within 2 years, you will see the same percentage of companies using email archiving for both eDiscovery and content governance. Let me know if you agree.