by Robert Smallwood, KM World Magazine
04-01-2007
Just when knowledge workers thought IT might be getting a handle on managing burgeoning email, IM and other content, the goal line keeps moving. There is not only an ever-expanding amount of content, but it is coming from a greater variety of sources and there are new requirements for capture and classification of live content coming from regulation, litigation and governance demands.
“There’s an explosion of content from blogs, wikis, web meetings, voice over IP, collaboration systems, email and IM and it’s causing chaos in the enterprise,” states T.M. Ravi, President and CEO of Mimosa Systems. “The bigger problem is not simply storage, but that this content is fragmented in various repositories causing higher storage and access costs. Then you have increased security, legal and compliance issues on top of it all.”
Email management (EMM) has rapidly evolved from simple archiving of IMs, emails and attachments to a compliance and records solution that lies at the nexus of email archiving, enterprise content management, electronic records management and e-discovery.
These demands have IT managers running into the arms of new technology content management firms like Mimosa which provides a suite for capture and archiving of live content. Mimosa has experienced rapid growth – to 130+ employees since shipping its first software license less than two years ago. They added nearly 100 new customers in the last year and count a 56,000 seat installation at ACS, as well as Sears and AAA as major customers.
The field of vendors competing in the EMM marketplace offer both hosted and in-house alternatives. Some of the larger and more active players range from A to Z and include AXS-One, Zantaz, ZipLip and ZyLab, as well as Fortiva, MessageSolution, Postini, and Sherpa Software. ECM vendors like OpenText, Hyland and Stellent have offerings too.
But the established leaders in this marketplace are certainly Symantec and EMC, both which have strong roots in email archiving and storage management. According to Art Gilliand, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Symantec, their Enterprise Vault product (acquired in the Veritas acquisition, and previously from U.K.-based KVS) has over 4,500 customers and manages more than 8 million email mailboxes. Pressures in the marketplace for the capture of live content have caused Symantec to broaden its product mix with Information Foundation 2007, which connects to Enterprise Vault.
EMC, Symantec’s challenger in the EMM marketplace, has about half as many organizations using its EmailXtender family of products versus Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, according to Stewart Noyce, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at EMC. Noyce has noted some key trends over the past year: “Initially, organizations looked for storage savings and optimization. Increasingly, they are demanding journaling of content, records management and e-discovery capabilities.”
Which brings us to the hammer that’s driving growth in the EMM marketplace: the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which went into effect in December, 2006. There’s nothing like a new governmental mandate to heat up an already exploding marketplace! Just when large firms have gotten their arms around SOX and HIPAA, a new requirement enters the picture to further fuel the need for EMM software. “Firms knew it was coming so they stepped up implementations over the past year,” Noyce adds.
The new amendments to the FRCP address cost and format issues for the production of electronically-generated information during the discovery process. But more important, they require that firms establish and follow policies for the preservation (and destruction) of email and other electronically-generated information – and to be able to prove they do. They must be able to instantly put a “litigation hold” on electronic information once they can “reasonable anticipate” litigation to ensure that it is preserved adequately as the discovery process proceeds.
But there’s something entirely new that has hit the marketplace causing records managers to scurry. Just when the courts try and formulate rules for electronically created evidence, a new technology has broken into the marketplace for “recordless” email, which goes beyond simple email encryption and wipes clean any trace of an email exchange – forever.
Vaporware, from NY-based Void Communications, LLC uses a new technology to stream encrypted email, called VaporStream. Once a message is read, it disappears without a trace. “It really comes down to having the ability to collaborate with confidentiality. It’s a First Amendment right,” says CEO Joe Collins, Jr. It’s an idea that appeals to over 90% of U.S. executives, according to a recent market survey. With traditional e-mail, instant messaging or mobile communication, every message leaves a record on a computer or a server somewhere- even if you have deleted it. And where there is a record, there is the ability to retrieve that message and disclose its private contents, even if it is out of context and can be misinterpreted. VaporStream messages cannot be forwarded, edited or saved. They are streamed from a server and once read, the messages are gone forever, and totally “recordless.”
So the EMM market continues to be dynamic and healthy, driven by the insatiable hunger of organizations to make sense of their content, aggressive litigators and continued governmental demands.
Next month we’ll review some of the leading and emerging solutions in email management in detail.
Robert Smallwood is a Partner with IMERGE Consulting and author of the book Taming the Email Tiger. He may be reached at Robert.Smallwood@imergeconsult.com.
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