Current Market Conditions

The current market conditions are certainly creating many challenges for all of us. Whether it is a reduction in work force at your employer or trying to buy a new car. GMAC's announcement that they will only approve those with a FICO score over 700, will limit who can gain financing to the vast majority of the public in today's world. Yet they wonder why they can't sell cars ;)

When people ask me how we're "weathering the storm" and how we're adjusting to the "new market", I tell them the truth. We're hiring people, we're expediting our new product version releases and we're going to have our largest quarter in the history of the company.

To some this is shocking, to others who know the market we are in or in similar markets, they explain that they are doing the same and seeing the same growth potential. In the world of archiving, the data exists for a reason. It exists solely for the function of being able to access it in the future.

What the market is discovering is that their existing applications and storage platforms are unable to retrieve the data in either a fast enough time frame or the fact that some applications are failing all together. Here is the issue. The main function these applications are to provide, they can not. Procedo re-enables our customers to be able to discover this data by migrating it from one archive platform to another in a guaranteed method.

In the times of increased oversight, mergers & acquisitions, takeovers, shareholder lawsuits; the one key item for all of these will be a need for e-discovery solutions. Being able to move the data forward into applications, storage or even SaaS providers that can produce the data on demand as needed will be critical for these companies and exactly what Procedo does. We enable these companies to respond to the demands that are being placed on them in terms of their archived data.

The Communication Archive

Ever since humans have been communicating, we have been keeping communication archives. In prehistoric times, it was cave paintings, to the Bible to the Quran, etc. Ever since we have been able to keep a record in some form of written mechanism, we have technically been archiving this data for not only the current generation, but future generations ability to look back on earlier times.

As we continue to evolve in terms of how we communicate and the technology that surrounds us, we 'Archive' in new ways. The electronic archive. Some people feel as though we've changed the world in terms of this new concept called "archiving." Technology is merely giving us a new place to store our communication archives. It's not on the side of a stone, but within a little black box on a shiny metal round disk.

From the beginning of "Modern History", we have been able to trace back historical records through written notes of historical events, "archives." Now imagine the world 500 years into the future. What are historians going to be able to search through to create history books? Will the "electornic age" become the second coming of the "dark ages" because nobody will be able to figure out why we didn't keep written records of events? Historians will find these little metal boxes with shiny round disks in them and have no idea where all of our paper is.

Maybe we can't find much written history from the original dark ages because they already had email archives and we just can't figure out how to read them or where they were stored? :)

When chosing a new archive solution, keep in mind how you will adapt your current archive and even the next version of your archive. When implementing your new archive, don't forget about your old data. Keeping your archived data in the most current format will allow for easier transitions and migrations in the future and keeping future historians with something they can read and understand in 500 years.

Don't let this become the second dark age in history, keep your archived data current.

Archive Retention Policies - Use Them

So one of my biggest pet peeves in the archiving space is retention policies. This is probably in the top 10 requirements of any major firm looking to deploy an archive today. They require the ability to set a single or multiple retention policies for their data. So my question to virtually any customer that I've ever spoken to is this. WHY ARE YOU NOT DELETING DATA???

I've spoken at a few different conferences over the past few years and one of the items I like to get feedback on is in regard to retention policy adherence. The first question that I'll ask is "how many of you have an email archive deployed and have retention policies set on your data". Being that these conferences are about archiving, virtually everyone raises their hands. Now brings the second and guilt-ridden question, "how many of you have data that is OLDER than the retention policy?" The frustration starts to brew when all of the hands stay up from the first question. Why insist on retention policies if you don't use them?

The last time I presented these questions was before a group of 75 CIO's. These people know they have data that is currently not being properly managed. That is what the application and archive storage is for. Retention policy adherence is something that needs to be adhered to more. If there is a policy, follow it. If you decide you're not sure how long you're going to need your data, pick a timeframe of X and ALSO have your policy state that it will be up for review on that date. If you need to extend the date out again, you now have that ability to do so and the data won't become lost in a graveyard waiting for someone to dig it up.

When I was at a client site a few years back, one of their senior directors came up to me with two backup tapes in his hand. He looked at me and said, "can you recover this by tomorrow?" I honestly had never seen that kind of tape in my life. I looked at him and actually laughed. My first response back was, "WHY do you still have this tape, is there anything on it?" All he knew was that there was a post-it with the label "1997 - Email Data". This company had a 3 year retention policy at the time. So clearly I assumed the tape was headed to be destroyed since it was 2004. Much to my disbelief, it was headed back to the storage area in case they needed it. This is a classic example of what not to do.

From our experiences working with customers across all verticals and across the globe, the one thing that courts are looking for is adherence to whatever policy you have. If you have data that is 10 years old, but for some reason destroyed data exactly at 7 years, the court assumes you are hiding something. If your policy is to only keep data 7 years, then get rid of the 10 year old data.

Archive Retention Policies are there for many great reasons. Abide by them and use them. Be consistent.

Transformation of Email Archiving

I started my technology career around the time Microsoft Mail was being introduced and messages were being sent to other employees just to see "did you really get that"? After this amazing addition of technology happened, the company I worked for added a 'dial-up gateway' where messages were sent over this magical thing called the Internet, it queued messages up on the server and dialed up and processed these messages, checked to see if any were destined for its users and then hung up, only to do the task again at a blazing speed of 14.4 kbps in another 3o minutes.

Email archiving in its rawest form has been around as long as the email environmnets have existed. Users have saved emails into some form of a personal archive, corporations have saved email on tape, made duplicate copies, or some other form of application to secure and store email longer than it was perhaps "intended" to be around. Regardless, it is.

Some of the top leading email archive applications today, have existed for over 10 years. Email archiving is not a new fad that is simply going to go away. It has become a major requirement for messaging infrastructures and an expectation to be deployed in the top Fortune 5000+ companies whether they are a financial industry regulated company or not. The latest analyst reports indicate that there are over 25,000 deployments of enterprise email archives in the world and is still one of the fastest growing market segments for enterprise software and storage.

So if email archiving is nothing "new" and is deployed in the top accounts across the globe, how can it be transforming. The transformation comes from the constant change in the market; archiving vendors get acquired: OTG to Legato to EMC, KVS to Veritas to Symantec, Educom to Zantaz to Atonomy, Persist (spun off from Zantaz) to HP, and more. These are some of the top deployed archiving applications in the world and they are changing ownership, adding features and improving their products. So if the vendors are constantly making changes, how could it be assumed that customers would not?

End users are constantly changing their minds about what they want and need. Maybe it's because a really good sales person convinced them they need their product, or they are sick of supporting an end user that always complains about some feature not working or that simply does not exist within their current product. So what are these customers doing? They are making changes. They are changing their archiving applications.

These changes that we are seeing in the market is nothing new for technology. As products and solutions improve, customers want their environment to improve as well. Customers make changes for all reasons good and bad; cost, features, functions, storage management, political, 'cause there is a cool button' and more.

The email archiving market is transforming. It's transforming from a rich green field of opportunities that all you had to do was throw a few lawn darts and wherever they landed was your next million dollar archiving sale. To today where the opportunities exist, but the field is already full of paying customers on competitive platforms. Tomorrow's customers were the competitor's customer 1,3,5 years ago. Opportunity exists in these 25,000+ accounts for vendors to sell them their solution. Customers have already determined that they need an archiving product. Vendors just need to convince the customers that their product is best for them now and that migrating the data will magically happen.

End users need to ask themselves if their product is the best for them. If not, now is the time to determine which product is. We've proven that these archives are not going away anytime soon. The archive market is transforming. Is your vendor helping you get to where you want to be?