Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Cisco acquires cloud-based web security provider ScanSafe for $183 million

Nick Mehta — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:08:00 GMT

We have a lot of respect for peers of ours in other cloud computing categories. In particular, ScanSafe has been an innovator in the cloud-based web security space for a long time.

Today, Cisco's security business unit announced they are acquiring ScanSafe for $183 million.

"With the acquisition of ScanSafe, Cisco is executing on our vision to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services for advanced security enforcement," said Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit (STBU). "Cisco will provide customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best suits their organization and deliver anytime, anywhere protection against Web-based threats."

I've met with Tom Gillis at Cisco before and he's an impressive leader. Between the amazing success IronPort has had and the new acquisition of ScanSafe, it seems like Cisco is doing well in the cloud security space.

Congrats to Cisco and the ScanSafe team. Seems like a good fit for both and more validation of cloud computing in general.

Boston Email Blunders Extend Beyond Mayor’s Office

Stephanie O'Neill — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:41:00 GMT

State public records law? What state public records law? Apparently Boston city leaders didn't get the memo ... or at least they didn't let old habits die when improper email deleting practices first came to light.

Last month, I wrote about a key member of Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino's staff, Chief Policy Adviser Michael J. Kineavy, deleting emails without regard for state public records laws. The issue came to light when the Boston Globe requested copies of Kineavy's emails over a six-month period, which only returned 18 results. This led to the revelation that Kineavy deleted all of his email on a daily basis, without letting them be backed up, in direct violation of Massachusetts public records law.

But the saga continues ...

It turns out that many employees at Boston City Hall were deleting emails regularly - it was a common and seemingly acceptable practice for mailbox management. The problem is state public records law requires the city to preserve "all city email" for two years. Even more surprising, the Boston Globe discovered that a state judge warned Mayor Menino's administration that city employees were deleting email nearly a year ago, but no one did anything to stop it.

Now, Kineavy's computer is undergoing a forensic review, and who knows if city employees are still deleting emails. But I bet Mayor Menino wishes he had a seamless email archiving solution in place right about now.

Email Deflates Balloon Boy Hoax

Stephanie O'Neill — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:13:00 GMT

Once again, email records are at the center of a highly publicized case. This time, they foil a plot for what appears to be fame. Mission accomplished, but I am pretty sure felony charges aren't what the Heenes had in mind.

I realize I may sound like a broken record, but I still find it surprising that people don't know better in this day and age. Even if you put all the ethical and parental lapses of this case aside, who thinks they can put an elaborate plan like this in writing - in email, no less - and not have it come back to bite them? That's a rhetorical question, of course.

But perhaps even more surprising, reports indicate that a "media outlet" may have been involved in the hoax (to what extent, if any, remains to be seen). If this turns out to be true, the plot will definitely thicken - especially if more emails are involved. Let's be clear here: They absolutely should know better. Whether they are a highly respected news organization or in the company of tabloid paparazzi, any organization that has a chance of being involved in litigation within the U.S. Federal Court system must be prepared for legal discovery, according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). For most companies, this means an email archiving solution. But one way or another, if this yet unnamed organization was involved, emails will most certainly come into play - and if they aren't able to produce the data in a timely manner and prove that it wasn't tampered with, they will have another issue on their hands.

Only time will tell. But whatever the outcome of this strange case may be in the coming weeks and months, I think it's safe to say that the Heenes' reality show dreams floated away with that balloon ... at least I hope so!

Cloud wars: IBM enters cloud email price battle

Nick Mehta — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:37:00 GMT

Fans of the Godzilla franchise will attest to the fact that it's fun to watch giants at battle.

Last week, IBM introduced LotusLive iNotes, its cloud-based email offering in response to Google Apps and Microsoft Online Services.

As LiveOffice is a long-time provider of cloud-based email archiving services, we are excited about the increasing choice for customers in cloud email.

IBM has chosen to enter the market at a low price point ($36 per user per year, versus $50 for Google) but provides fairly limited mailbox sizes (1 GB) in its first iteration.

With rumors of Cisco entering the market, the battle is certainly going to be exciting to watch.

Matt Cain from analyst firm Gartner Group put it well in a recent interview with CRN.com:

"It's going to be a battle to the death," said Cain. "It's going to be great because the customer wins.

Let the wagers begin as to who ends up as Godzilla and who becomes Mothra.

Groundhog Day: Email is dead again... not!

Nick Mehta — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:04:00 GMT

One of my favorite movies of all time is Bill Murray's masterpiece, Groundhog Day. In the movie, Bill is stuck in a small town in my native Pennsylvania, where he wakes up each day to repeat the day before.

Every year, I read the same article and I feel like I'm stuck in that movie. You know that article. The one with the brilliant insight that we get too much email and that we can't keep up. And that some (IM, SMS, facebook, twitter, Google Wave) new technology will repeat it.

Well here's the latest Groundhog Day sighting from the Wall Street Journal:

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold-services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate-in ways we can only begin to imagine.

You can read my thoughts at my last post on this topic, after the last article with exactly the same theme, about a year ago. These articles seem to pop up once a year, as predictably as Punxsutawney Phil finds his shadow.

Admittedly, since I run a cloud-based email archiving provider, I'm highly biased.

However, many others agree with me. As analyst Michael Osterman put it in his response, the reason these email death sentences are ridiculous is that the new communication media tend to be complements to, not replacements of, email:

Further, it's important to understand that email is not really competitive with instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook or other tools -- for the most part, these tools are complementary. For example, if it's 3:00am and I need to send a file to someone, I will have little expectation that the recipient will be available via IM, and I can't send them a file on Twitter, but I can send them an email knowing they'll receive it in the morning. If it's 10:00am and I need a quick answer to a question, I can IM someone whose presence status I can see. If I want to follow the comments and news pointers from people whose opinion I consider valuable I will use Twitter. If I need to collaborate on a project via a shared workspace, I will use any of the growing number of tools built for that purpose.

Similarly, blogger Email Tide points out that the beauty of email is that it keeps evolving:

In reality, email is still evolving to better handle the vast amounts and types of information that it was never intended for. New social networking services, instant messaging, voice, video, presence, wikis, blogs, bookmarking, media sharing and micro blogging will eventually all come together and complement each other, and email will definitely be part of the mix. Solutions such as Xobni or Baydin are leading the way to a more useful and better-integrated mailbox.

So email isn't dead and probably won't be for quite a while. However, that doesn't mean we'll stop talking about it.

Prime Time: Exchange 2010 takes the field

Nick Mehta — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:05:00 GMT

Quick post but we're excited to see Microsoft has released Exchange 2010 to manufacturing. They are targeting November 9th for General Availability.

Microsoft is claiming 10 million mailboxes already hosted on Exchange 2010 via its Live@Edu educational hosting program.

As we announced back on September 1, 2009, we officially support email archiving of Microsoft Exchange 2010 today. Indeed, as we discuss in the previous post, we think there is a great value proposition for using archiving ahead of a move to Exchange 2010 to reduce migration time, cost and risk.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS wanna-bes

Nick Mehta — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:09:00 GMT

With apologies to Ginger, Scary, Baby, Posh and Sporty of the Spice Girls, if you "really really want" a software-as-a-service solution for email archiving, you often have to search through many wanna-bes.

One of the most common techniques for half-SaaSing one's way into cloud is for on-premise vendors to take license software and attempt to host it themselves or through partners.

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet refers to this as SoSaaS, or "Same old Software, as a Service."

The excellent analysts at Haut Tech put this as #1 in their spot-on list of "Ten Ways to Fail as a SaaS Company":

Your licensed product is very unlikely to be a good candidate for a SaaS product. This is a "test" of something you can never sell, maintain, operate or scale to reach a decent market. So - what are you testing? This is what is known as SoSaaS. Vendors of licensed products, especially high-value, line of business applications, typically aim their product at the top of their vertical market. It's just more cost efficient for sales and marketing. The product is loaded with features that satisfy that end of the market and tuned for skilled install by client IT personnel. If it penetrates the 100 top accounts - it's golden. SaaS products are built to sell and scale to a much wider market. If you can't do that you are very unlikely to recover your hosting and maintenance costs - much less further development costs in a SaaS model.

Having lived in both the on-premise and SaaS worlds, I fundamentally believe the business models and product development strategies are different. SaaS vendors can't force fit their way into the on-premise world and software vendors can't magically become service providers.

SaaS for email archiving requires product simplicity, usability and scalability often not found in on-premise solutions. In addition, on-premise vendors typically don't have the in-house experience in network operations, service level management and billing that is required for the second "S" in SaaS.

So if your on-premise software vendor tells you they have a new SaaS "delivery model" or "hosting capability," I'd take the Spice Girls' advice:

Now don't go wasting my precious time
Get your act together we could be just fine

Showing On-Prem Email the Door

Amy Dugdale — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:51:00 GMT

Once in awhile, a blog post rolls around that is so profound, you can't help but blog about it. Eric Knorr - you rock. The excerpt from your entry that follows below is simply poetic -

It's time for e-mail to go. Out of the datacenter, pronto. Get the hand trucks, hold the door, and roll those mail servers outta here. Email is a storage hog, a time-suck to manage, a compliance liability, and about the least strategic thing imaginable. It's one of the few "services" that seems absolutely perfect for the cloud: a commodity with a well-known, pedestrian set of expectations. Please, let somebody else handle it.

And, then there's this ...

I just want e-mail to be isolated as an enterprise-class cloud service, with all the modern archiving and anti-spam and compliance features you could ask for and a massively scalable underlying server infrastructure IT never has to worry about. Why is that so hard? Yes, I know some companies can't outsource messaging for compliance reasons. But for everyone else, the time has come to show e-mail the door.

This all sounds familiar ... we hear the same thing from many of our clients each day. They are done managing email and archiving on-premise. If there's one service they're willing to move into the cloud - it's email - and understandably so.

On a related note, we're excited to see IBM throwing their hat into the cloud email ring with the intro of their new Lotus Live iNotes offering. Dear Lotus Notes -- Welcome to the cloud! There's plenty of room and the view is good. -- Sincerely, Your Friends at LiveOffice

SaaS Revenues: The New Darlings of Software

Joe Diamond — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:24:00 GMT

Ray Wang, a partner at Altimeter Group, compiled revenues for some of the larger on-premise and cloud-based providers and discovered an interesting trend. In yet another tribute to Neil Patrick Harris, wait for it... SaaS vendors are seeing year-over-year revenue gains and on-premise vendors, on average... aren't.

Wang's analysis:

"Continued economic pressures force customers to choose best of breed and purpose built solutions. SaaS vendors appear to be the beneficiary as the overall business model aligns with client pain points."

This mirrors what we here at LiveOffice have been seeing within the industry as well. The cloud gives organizations the opportunity to implement solutions that remedy some of their most vital business needs (such as email archiving), at a price that won't have the CFO bawling while keeled over the books. This is all part of a compelling story that will seemingly keep the cloud sky high for years to come. We're just happy to be a part of it.

SaaS Security, the Age-Long Debate

Joe Diamond — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:07:00 GMT

Michael Osterman of Osterman Research submitted an entry to Messaging Wire a couple of days ago about the misconception that the SaaS delivery model is less secure than your average on-premise solution.

He made some excellent points and did so in short order. The following two resonated with me:

Education is the key. Take the time to help decision makers understand how secure (or insecure) their on-premise infrastructure and data transmission actually is.
Help prospective customers to understand that their internal security procedures may be giving them a false sense of security. Is it particularly difficult for an employee to gain access to a server room and run off with a backup tape or external storage device? In many cases, it's not.

Osterman goes on to suggest that leading SaaS providers are able to offer better security because they have access to far more resources than most organizations do with their on-premise implementations. We couldn't agree more.

This entry is just a precursor to a study that Osterman Research will be publishing shortly. We're certainly interested in seeing and addressing the statistics associated with the security aspect of SaaS.

Careful, Hitting “Delete” Doesn’t Always Mean It’s Gone for Good

Stephanie O'Neill — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:27:00 GMT

I am constantly amazed that people, including public officials, still think they can completely delete things they send via email. Although you may delete email from your possession, you have no control over the recipients of those messages - or the recipients they may forward your messages to, and so on. Your company - or government entity, as the case may be - could very well have an email archiving solution in place that is automatic and seamless, and you may or may not know about it. The recipients' organizations are likely archiving as well. One thing is for sure: There is always a trail.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino is finding out the hard way that deleting email is not a best practice. Two local city councilors and challengers of Menino in an upcoming Democratic preliminary election are asking the local attorney general and district attorney to investigate the routine deletion of emails by officials in Menino's administration, including those sent and received by one of his closest advisors, Michael J. Kineavy.

The controversy arose when the Boston Globe requested copies of Kineavy's email communications over a six-month period. The search returned only 18 results. The unusually low volume of email led to questioning by city officials and an admission by Kineavy that he doesn't allow his email to be backed up and deletes all of it on a daily basis, which violates state public records law.

The result of this investigation is yet to be determined, but whether or not an archiving solution was in place, chances are that some of those emails will turn up somewhere. An email archiving solution is a really great insurance policy for any organization, public or private, that may become the subject of an investigation or lawsuit - and it saves a lot of time and money in instances like the one brewing in Boston.

This isn't the first time we've seen a case like this, and unfortunately, it's probably not going to be the last. The bottom line? If you're trying to hide something, it will inevitably catch up with you, thanks to technology and the age of electronic communications.

LiveOffice and EOS: A Partnership in the Clouds

Joe Diamond — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:52:00 GMT

It's pitch black outside and the crickets are chirping, but today we decided to wake up early and announce that we've formed a partnership with the UK-based value-added reseller, EMEA Office Systems.

Martin Blackmore and Mark Thomson at EOS both have decades of experience in the storage industry and really know archiving. A few of us at LiveOffice have worked with them in the past and we're glad to be working with them again. When they proposed the idea of a partnership, we were all ears. Their regional knowledge combined with our archiving services provides EMEA-based businesses with the winning option for cloud-based email archiving and e-discovery services.

You can check out the news release here: http://bit.ly/A0Tg8

Ready to Make Your Server the Biggest Loser?

Amy Dugdale — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:25:00 GMT

Today we announced archiving support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and we're pretty excited about it. We've tested the journaling functionality extensively in our labs and it works great. What we're even more excited about is the tools we've built over the last few months to help ease the migration pains that many organizations will inevitably struggle with as they upgrade to Exchange 2010.

We believe companies should have a simple process for shrinking their Exchange data stores prior to moving them so that they can speed up the transition process. So while Valerie Bertinelli has Jenny Craig and Jared has Subway, we're hoping Exchange shops will consider our pre-migration diet, which consists of:

LiveOffice Personal Archive: First, clients enable journaling on their existing mail servers, allowing LiveOffice to capture data in its secure cloud, which effectively eliminates the need to migrate that data in the future. With Personal Archive's robust architecture, end users are able to view all archived email (legacy and current) from the comfort of their Microsoft Outlook client.
LiveOffice CloudMerge for Microsoft Exchange: Next, clients can leverage LiveOffice's proprietary CloudMerge technology to automatically and securely transfer data from existing Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 mail stores to LiveOffice Personal Archive. Again, this data is available for view by end users directly from Microsoft Outlook.
LiveOffice CloudMerge for PST Files: LiveOffice's CloudMerge technology is also able to securely ingest an organization's PST files into the centrally managed, hosted archive - eliminating the most common source of data loss and IT headaches.
"Skinny Migration:" With all historical and ongoing email securely stored in LiveOffice's cloud-based archive, IT administrators only need to migrate a small amount of data to their upgraded Exchange 2010 environment.

The official launch of Exchange 2010 isn't expected until later this year, but we are encouraging companies to start archiving their messages now so that they can focus on the actual upgrade when the time comes.

You can read our news release here.

SaaS, It’s What’s for Dinner!

Amy Dugdale — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:11:00 GMT

When I finished undergrad, my first job was doing investor relations for pre-IPO dot coms during the late 90s Internet boom. I'm not going to try and be casual about it - undeniably, it was cool. The concept of online search and e-commerce were brand new and SaaS was on the distant horizon. Back then, I had no idea that the day would come when I would count on the Internet for nearly all of my software applications. But that day is definitely here.

Mary Weier recently blogged about the fact that SaaS companies should "dog food" SaaS and we couldn't agree more. We are eating the SaaS dog food and it tastes pretty good - plus it keeps our internal systems lean. Naturally, we use our own Hosted Exchange 2007 as well as Personal Archive and Discovery Archive. We also use:

• Zuora for billing
• Salesforce for CRM
• Vanguard Vista & Survey Monkey for surveys

In marketing, we use SaaS applications to help us with our public relations efforts as well as lead generation and nurture marketing. Our HR department also relies on SaaS for benefits administration and other tasks - and we've also got a SaaS-powered knowledgebase.

So, overall - we are finding that the SaaS life is indeed the good life. Now, if only I'd been able to get in on the friends & family buy for the Amazon.com IPO ;-)

Don’t Email Me Here!

Joe Diamond — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:02:00 GMT

Many people believe that business and pleasure mix like oil and water. In many ways, I strongly agree with this school of thought - especially when it comes to how I use my email. I use my personal email exclusively for topics of the personal nature, and my work-sanctioned email for topics pertaining to my organization. I even take it as far as asking the individuals from my personal world to not email my work address. However, not everyone agrees. When it comes to emailing the Alaska governor's office, you may be directed to a Gmail or Hotmail account rather than a .gov address.

Superior Court Judge Jack W. Smith ruled that those who are employed by Alaska's governor's office can use personal email accounts to conduct state business. Judge Smith supported his ruling in saying that there is no provision in Alaska state law that prohibits the use of private email accounts when conducting state business.

This all started when an Alaska citizen stressed a concern with state officials using personal email for state business. She contended that using private email accounts for state business would prevent citizens from being able to inspect public records.

As of this moment, it's not known whether or not there will be an appeal. But, it'll be interesting to see if Smith's ruling holds. What's your take? Do you think that it's acceptable for state officials to handle state business using a personal email account? Something tells me that we already know what Fred Stresau's stance on the matter is.

LiveOffice named to Inc 5000

Nick Mehta — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:28:00 GMT

I fondly remember seeing my dad's copies of business magazines like Inc and Business Week on the dining room table as a kid and diving into them to see why he worked so late some evenings. My father, a longtime CEO and entrepreneur, always coached me on the merits of running your own business and on the importance small business has to our world.

And while the love that he passed on to me for business magazines may not have won me many popularity contests in middle school, it certainly started a lifelong love of business for me as well.

Inc magazine has long been a tribute to the hardworking small business people through the United States. It's been an honor for us at LiveOffice to be named to the Inc 5000 list for two years in a row.

The specifics of the award mean that our company is growing rapidly, as evidenced by our recent Q2 2009 record results.

More generally, though, we attribute our success to several factors:

The continued recognition by companies, schools, hospitals and governments organizations that email archiving is a must-have.
Increasing adoption of email archiving beyond basic email compliance use cases for email discovery and mailbox management.
Increasing interest in cloud-based services in general and cloud-based email in particular.
The inherent resilience of a software-as-a-service business model, where as long as you maintain your existing clients, your financials are predictable and robust.
Most importantly, the faith that other businesses, many of them small to mid-sized ones, put in our service. It's to them, that we owe so much thanks.

Solving the Mystery of “The Cloud”

Stephanie O'Neill — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:34:00 GMT

Although cloud computing is expected to grow almost threefold over the next few years, reaching $42 billion by 2012 (IDC), it remains an elusive term for many IT professionals. According to a survey by document management software company Version One, 41 percent of senior IT professionals admit that they "don't know" what cloud computing is - a staggering number for such a burgeoning industry.

By definition, cloud computing is simply the delivery of hosted services over the Internet. ("Cloud" is just a metaphor for the Internet.) The meaning gets a bit more complicated as you dig deeper, because cloud computing comprises a broad spectrum of services, including applications, storage and spam filtering. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) all fall under the cloud computing umbrella. For example, LiveOffice email archiving solutions, Salesforce.com and GoogleApps are all examples of cloud-based services.

The beauty of the cloud is that it offers a lot of benefits to meet varying needs.

1. It's on-demand, so you can add new service(s) whenever you need them.

2. It's scalable, so you can use as little or as much of the service(s) as you want.

3. It's affordable and predictable (usually per user, per month fees), which is easier to budget.

4. It's offsite, so it doesn't put a strain on your internal systems or resources.

5. It's easy to setup and use, so you don't have to be an IT whiz to run it.

Unfortunately, the confusion over cloud computing probably isn't going away anytime soon. Whether you're asking an expert analyst, a savvy IT pro or an end user, everyone seems to have their own slightly different idea of what cloud computing really means. In the end, it all comes down to semantics - and it could take a while to iron out the ambiguity. The important thing to remember is that no matter what you call it, it's big for businesses, and it's here to stay.

Canada’s Derailed Emails

Joe Diamond — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:50:00 GMT

Even the Canadian government is required to produce electronically stored information (ESI), despite a ruling that cabinet confidentiality is absolute. BC Rail, formerly a crown corporation, sold to Canadian National Railway in 2004 for $1 billion and is now the subject of a trial surrounding a scandal known to Canadians as "Railgate". Now, emails relevant to the case appear to be getting "star witness" status. The only question is whether or not the messages still exist.

"Potentially the destruction of evidence, whether by recklessness, negligence ... or a willful failure to preserve, could be a very significant factor in the outcome of this case and it potentially could lead to a motion [of dismissal] for abuse of process," said Michael Bolton, one of the lawyers for the defense.

According to the Vancouver Sun, trial judge Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Bennett was told the emails, which were stored on backup tapes, had been sent to a company called EDS Advanced Solutions. The business and technology solution provider was told in May to no longer retain the data. Since then, Justice Bennett has ruled that the emails are indeed relevant to the case, and that they will need to be produced.

At this point, it's clear that the case hinges entirely on the content of these emails. If they can't be produced, the 0-60 time before a motion to dismiss arrives will be less than four seconds. It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out.

The Big Switch

Amy Dugdale — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:20:00 GMT

It's on! The debate regarding how much and how quickly enterprises will shift their data to the cloud is hot. While some already believe the day of "public" cloud utilities is just around the corner, others - like CNET blogger James Urquhart - beg to differ. He makes some great points in a recent post:

Data is not electricity.

Here is the fundamental difference between data and electricity: With electricity, I don't care what electrons pushed the electrons that ultimately come out of the socket. I also don't care that if I were to generate power and supply it to the grid (through, say, solar panels on my home) who might take that electricity and store it in a battery someplace. An amp is an amp is an amp.

With the cloud, however, I care about exactly which bits come out of my ethernet port. Furthermore, if I generate data and put it out on the Internet, I care exactly where and how my data is stored, and who can have access to it. The Internet is not a shared information grid, its a shared network for transmitting information from one specific point to another. There is a difference.

Urquhart also points out that, "While the infrastructure we use to deliver information technology might be getting commoditized, the information itself won't." In short, he believes the much-talked-about "Big Switch" will slowly take place over several decades vs. a rapid shift in the next few years. At the root of it all is a fundamental trust issue - no one is going to move their data to the cloud until they trust it. In my experience, trusting something means testing it out first.

And that brings us to where we are today - what I would call the middle ground of the Big Switch. We are seeing organizations of all sizes take the first step into the cloud with our SaaS email archiving and hosting solutions. For many, this is their first foray into storing data they care about in the cloud. The necessity is two-fold - first, storing years of email is getting expensive (since mail servers are now replacing file cabinets) and second, they are "testing" the cloud to determine whether or not they are comfortable with it. These companies are also using this small, but significant step into the cloud to introduce the concept to their executive management teams and end users for the first time (ahhhh ... the famed "buy-in" that all management books tell us is essential when launching new initiatives).

But wait, there's even more on the middle ground front - hybrid solutions. These are applications that blend together on-premise systems with the cloud and leverage the best of both infrastructures. We recently formed a partnership with Mimosa Systems, an on-premise archiving provider, to give organizations a hybrid email archiving solution. Using our CloudMerge tool, we are able to seamlessly connect Mimosa's on-premise archive to our cloud-based email archiving application. This gives companies cost-effective long-term email storage and also expedites external e-discovery review.

So while the BIG shift to public cloud utilities may be some time away, we're still encouraged by the progress organizations are making now.

As the saying goes, "Trust is earned, not given."

The Great Missed Email Caper

Joe Diamond — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:14:00 GMT

I once wrote a touching blog entry about my dear Aunt Judi, but she never indicated that she had actually read it, despite the fact that she was an email subscriber. I was hurt. Crushed. Dismayed. How could she blatantly ignore her favorite nephew? Throughout my entire childhood, she insisted that I was the center of her universe. Move forward to 2009, and we're facing The Great Missed Email Debacle of our generation. Today, it's finally clear how this travesty took place.

According to a recent report compiled by ReturnPath, more than 20% of email isn't delivered to inboxes in the United States and Canada. This is mostly the result of the type of junk mail filtering provided by the recipient's email solution of choice. With each solution maintaining its own criteria for such messages, I wanted to investigate further as to the likelihood of my aunt not receiving automated email about my special blog entry.

To say the least, the numbers were staggering. The toughest mailboxes to reach were Gmail (23%), Hotmail (20%), MSN (20%) and Yahoo! (15%). It seems that the emails most likely to not be delivered consist of email alerts, newsletters, automated system updates and generic marketing messages (not surprising). From personal experience, I can tell you that a significant portion of my requested alerts are still being sent to my junk folder. So while this isn't too surprising, the confirmation is nice.

Can you guess which one my Aunt Judi uses? Yup, that's right - Gmail! I got her to sign up for it so I'll take some of the blame. But then again, I suppose she may have simply deleted it. But that's an impossibility, right? I'm choosing to be delusional and insist that it must have been sent to her junk folder. C'est la vie.

P.S. Aunt Judi, if you're reading this, you're only getting dark meat at Thanksgiving!

Can You Turn a Blind Eye to Unread Email?

Joe Diamond — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:14:00 GMT

There's a new land development a-brewin' in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the citizens aren't particularly happy about it. So, rather than picketing or hoping that they'll be heard at a board meeting, they're taking advantage of the power of email. At least, that's what they thought were doing.

Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Charlotte Rodstrom revealed Fort Lauderdale Planning and Zoning Board member Fred Stresau's personal email address to the public. "[I was] just trying to make it more convenient for the public to give input. Would they prefer the public call them at home? It's a public process. We are public servants. We are here to serve the public," said Rodstrom.

Stresau thinks otherwise. "I don't need to hear from all these people that were here tonight, to have my e-mail clogged up because the city gave my e-mail address out," said Stresau. He has requested that the city remove his personal email from the public records, but Assistant City Attorney Sharon Miller has suggested that this isn't possible. Stresau's response? "...I'll change my e-mail address. This is absolutely ridiculous!"

It'll be interesting to see how this ends. On one hand, you can understand Stresau's frustration in that his personal email is being used for matters that are not personal. On the other hand, the city doesn't provide advisory board members with a .gov email address, so there's little alternative if residents want to communicate with him via email.

Surprise Audits Around the Corner for Financial Advisers?

Amy Dugdale — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:47:00 GMT

It appears as if the Madoff fallout has only just begun for financial advisers. InvestmentNews reported this week that the SEC's proposal to have certain advisers (those deducting fees from client accounts) conduct annual surprise audits is being challenged by the Financial Planning Association (FPA). While the SEC estimates these audits would run $8,000 apiece, the FPA claims they could cost up to $24,000 each.

In addition, the FPA feels that the SEC's proposal is "inappropriate." They are urging the SEC to hold off on any rule changes until the inspector general finishes its report on the Madoff case and Congress passes reform measures. The FPA is also recommending that the authority of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) be strengthened "to oversee audits of firms that hold physical custody of assets."

However, in order for the PCAOB to have such authority, new legislation is required. And, in fact has already been introduced by House Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa. If passed, it would allow the PCAOB to regulate accounting firms that audit all brokers.

Yet, another interesting development to watch as the Madoff fallout continues ...

Email Users Unwittingly Become Hackers’ Accomplices

Stephanie O'Neill — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:19:00 GMT

It's 2 a.m. on a Thursday - do you know where your email is? You better be sure, because a hacker may have hijacked it without you knowing. That's exactly what happened to Fox and Friends Weekend Co-host, Dave Briggs.

Hackers were able to guess Briggs' password or the answer to his security question and took over his Hotmail account. They blocked him from accessing his email by changing his identifying information and then spammed all of his contacts in a fraudulent ploy for money.

Briggs is not alone. Salma Hayek, Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin have also had their email accounts compromised. Even Twitter isn't immune to the efforts of hackers.

So what can we do to avoid this happening to us? First, it's important to create a strong password. At the very least, it should include upper and lowercase letters as well as numerals. Many of us tend to choose simple passwords that are easy for us to remember, but if they are easy for us, they are probably just as easy for hackers.

Internet Security Expert Robert Siciliano recommends choosing a security question with an answer that is based on opinion rather than fact. It's also important to make sure you aren't using anything that can be found on your social networking page or in other web-based environments, like ancestry.com. And just a reminder, using consecutive numbers, pet names or names of family members or friends is a bad idea and puts you at risk.

In the end, a little effort goes a long way. We have to be vigilant and avoid becoming targets. Once your information is compromised, it can - and often does - lead to identity theft, which is very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to undo once the damage has been done. So take charge, and beat the hackers at their own game.

Tweet-a-boo, I see you!

Joe Diamond — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:59:00 GMT

I've got a story, but you need to promise not to tell anyone. My mother-in-law caught me. Yeah, that's right. One day, she snuck up on me as I was scanning through a friend's Twitter profile and she promptly smacked me in the back of the head with a newspaper. She screamed, "Can't you kids call one another anymore? It seems that all you do is talk on the Internet now. LOL this, j/k that. It's ridiculous! Pick up the phone. Write a letter. Get off of the computer!"

It took some time for me to digest what she was saying. Admittedly, it seemed pretty ridiculous to me at the time. Is this her generation's way of telling us that they walked back and forth to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, and without the benefit of shoes? Perhaps it is. Either way, it got me thinking about the direction that we are heading.

Remember when email became all the rage, and everyone worried that the day of the handwritten letter had come and gone? I don't know the statistics, but I'm sure the United States Post Office has seen a drastic decline of letters passing through their hands. Is that the end of the world? Not at all. Writing an email is more convenient, is generally cost-free and ultimately has exactly the same effect.

The question is whether or not face-to-face communication is going the way of the handwritten letter. In many cases, participating in communities through social media allows individuals many of the same types of interaction as a face-to-face encounter would. You can communicate and collaborate freely, play games together for hours on end and even work together as you see fit. Point being, many of us are finding that social media is often more convenient, is also generally cost-free, and still can have exactly the same effect.

I suspect that social media has lessened the need for people to meet in person for some good old fashioned eye contact. It hasn't replaced it all together (nor will it), but I'd gather that we've seen a reduction. But, do me a favor. Don't tell my mother-in-law. She'd be upset, and she's armed with a newspaper.

Cloud Computing – Let the Magic Carpet Ride Begin

Joe Diamond — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The days of Doogie Howser's blue IBM PS/2 screen with the ever-so-subtle blinking cursor are long gone. Today, we've got desktop computers with multi-core processors, several gigabytes of RAM, hard drives in excess of a terabyte and fiber optic connections in our homes that can symmetrically transfer data at more than 15 megabits per second. And, how we're using these technologies and huge Internet pipelines would blow even Mr. Howser's genius mind.

Then, Doogie was rockin' an 8 MHz processor; today we're conceptualizing entire operating systems in the cloud. With Google's Chrome OS announcement, the "cloud computing" phrase is going to buzz even more. I get it - Google's omnipresent, but short of a locally-installed application here and there, that presence has almost always been strictly in the cloud. We all expected that Google's next big project would be a cloud-based operating system - it was simply the next logical step.

Creating even more cloud buzz, Microsoft recently announced that they will release a free, cloud-based version of their Office software. Up until now, Microsoft has been best known for their on-premise solutions. However, this announcement makes it clear that Microsoft has officially recognized the cloud as a viable vehicle for application delivery. But most importantly, this is the confirmation evangelists like us have known would one day come - the cloud is going mainstream.

The question is no longer whether or not cloud computing is here to stay; it's only a question as to which giant is going to win the race. So, who is it going to be? Google or Microsoft?

Who Can Get Away with a Five-Year Beta Testing Cycle? Google’s Gmail Can!

Joe Diamond — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:22:00 GMT

Remember when Gmail was released as an invitation-only beta service in 2004? I do - I was one of the early adopters. Even then, the service didn't behave as if it were a beta. With little to no down-time and mailbox size limits that were (at the time) much bigger than any competitors, the service just worked. And it worked well. Best of all, it was, and still remains, free. The only entirely new concept that users had to put up with was a series of unobtrusive sponsored links from within the email platform. I use the phrase "put up with" fairly loosely, as there have been dozens of times that, because of the abilities of Google's search engine to produce relevant results, I was actually interested in the link I was being asked to click.

While Google's renowned for many things, they'll never be known as an organization that has short beta cycles. Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesperson, attributes their extraordinarily long testing cycles to ensuring that their products meet their high standards. I have a hard time disagreeing with that. Just about every software company could learn a thing or two from their off-the-charts utility.

Utility aside, we all know that Gmail hasn't truly been a beta for roughly four-and-a-half years. Comparatively speaking, I'd say that the vast majority of "final" products released by software companies have been infinitely more bug-ridden than Gmail was on the day of its release. But, as they ramp up their efforts to offer a more compelling enterprise story, I understand their need to shed the beta label.

I'm in the process of starting a pool to determine how long Google Wave will be in beta for ;-). Let me know if you want in.

Who You Gonna Call? Email Busters!

Amy Dugdale — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:44:00 GMT

According to a recent AP story, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is missing emails - and lots of them.

Christopher Reade, a partner in a tech firm who assisted the Louisiana Technology Council in efforts to recover data for the mayor's office, said the mailbox was removed between June 2008 and May 2009. He said 22 gigabytes of data vanished from a defunct server on May 5 - the day of a conference call with the city on the work the outside technology experts would do - but he did not know if the mailbox was among that data.

The city of New Orleans has blamed the missing messages on a faulty server, but Reade's investigation has concluded that the loss of emails "could not be attributed to server damage that the city says occurred in June 2008." In fact, out of all the mailboxes of City Hall employees, Nagin's was the only one missing.

It has now turned into a He Said/He Said with Reade concluding that it would take a "technically competent human action" to remove the mailbox. However, the city's technology chief, M. Harrison Boyd, maintains that the mailbox was not intentionally removed by anyone on the staff.

Now, even Mayor Nagin himself is weighing in and declaring that all the missing messages have been found. Meanwhile, a Times-Picayune blog post is going so far as to call for a criminal investigation into the actions that led to the disappearance of the mayor's mailbox (and all of his email messages since he took office in 2002).

Should be interesting to watch this one play out ... I think I saw a proton pack for sale on eBay in case anyone's looking for one ...

Don’t Underestimate Technology, or You May Get Burned

Stephanie O'Neill — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:47:00 GMT

As far as technology has come in the past 20 years, I am still amazed that people underestimate its sheer power. But a disgruntled employee in India learned the hard way that destroying company records, i.e., deleting thousands of important emails from one of his pharmaceutical company employer's highly used accounts, could and would be traced back to him. With the help of the company's email service provider, local authorities were able to track down the suspect, using Internet protocol and Internet service provider addresses as well as broadband phone records. While the suspect's fate is yet to be determined, his former employer estimates the loss in the hundreds of thousands of local currency.

Of course if Health Guard Private Limited had an email archiving solution in place, the virtual war their former employee waged against them wouldn't have had such a crippling effect. In addition, they could have quickly and easily recovered their valuable data, which is now gone forever.

Unfortunately, there will probably always be a percentage of folks who think they can shirk the system and get away with something. Perhaps some do, but would you really want to chance it in this day and age? I can answer that right now ... that would be no, no for me.

Governor Schwarzenegger Signs California’s Electronic Discovery Act

Amy Dugdale — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:10:00 GMT

A version of the 2006 FRCP amendments regarding electronically stored information (ESI) has made its way to California. While Governor Schwarzenegger previously vetoed another version of California's Electronic Discovery Act for budgetary reasons, last night it appeared that even the state's budget woes were no match for the power of ESI in the courts. The Governor signed the new Act yesterday and it is effective immediately. According to the Act:

The Civil Discovery Act requires any documents produced in response to an inspection demand to be produced as they are kept in the usual course of business, or be organized and labeled to correspond with the categories in the demand. The documents are to be produced on the date described above or as agreed by the parties pursuant to an extension.

To view the Electronic Discovery Act in its entirety, click here. The bottom line is that in this day and age, e-discovery requests in court cases are commonplace. Quite frequently, the "smoking gun" evidence in many corporate cases is found in electronically stored records like emails. Now more than ever, organizations of all sizes need to be prepared to process and produce electronic records in a short amount of time. The message is clear - the federal courts and an increasing number of state courts expect electronic records to be just as accessible and producible as their hard copy ancestors.

So, have you heard the one about the lawyer and the "missing" emails? Me either, but I'm guessing it's coming ...

Are You Risking Compliance in an “Unsecure” Cloud?

Stephanie O'Neill — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:03:00 GMT

Two of the biggest concerns about cloud services are data control and security. While these are both very valid concerns, the security fear is also unsubstantiated (some vendors do have questionable practices about data ownership, but LiveOffice believes that every KB to TB of data belongs to its clients, and they can get it back whenever they want). Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or cloud, providers actually have some of the most advanced equipment and technologies on the market - much more high-end systems and safeguards than the majority of companies can afford on premise. After all, this is their livelihood. If they aren't experts at securing the data they store, they won't be around for very long.

Compliance goes hand in hand with these issues, but data stored on a vendor's servers is vulnerable to the same threats as data stored on your own servers. The important thing to note is that the best service providers are well equipped to deal with these challenges and minimize risk. Ultimately, they can do it more effectively than you can.

While there will always be naysayers, some feel that security is best left to the cloud. "SaaS is tailor made for keeping up with the rapid pace of malware development," says Cody Leser, senior director of channel sales at Trend Micro. "There's no way to push patch files continuously; you have to do it in the cloud."

Todd Fitzwater, principal at Demand Solutions Group, says, "Your data is actually getting taken care of in [service providers'] data center[s] better than in yours. The backup and recovery, disaster recovery and security around the servers is much tighter and higher grade than you would put in your own data center."

As with any major decision, companies need to do their due diligence and ask questions - lots of them. Where is the data being stored? What security measures are in place at each data center? Are the data centers redundant? Are the data centers monitored 24-7-365? What type of encryption is being used to protect data in transit? What type of infrastructure is being used to host the data? What type of spam-and-virus protection is in place? Can the data centers handle a sudden increase in demand? How often is data backed up and where are backups stored? Does the service provider enlist an independent, third-party vendor to conduct periodic security scans and other checks? What happens in the event of downtime or a disaster? What happens if the company decides to move its data elsewhere? What happens if the service provider goes out of business or sells to another company?

In the end, you need to make sure you are comfortable with the answers you receive. If there is any doubt about the security of your data, it's probably time to talk to another service provider.

The Intelligence Behind Email Patterns

Dean Nicolls — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:27:00 GMT

Researchers recently discovered some astonishing corporate email patterns when sifting through Enron's publically available email database. While they expected to see elevated chatter during moments of crisis, they found that email volumes picked up significantly more than a month before the company's downfall was common knowledge.

They also noticed that, as stress builds within a company, employees start talking directly to the individuals that they feel most comfortable with, which means they stop sharing information widely. Rather than hammering out long email threads with multiple recipients, this research shows that employee correspondence quickly becomes one-on-one emails to their most trusted colleagues. That is, in the midst of a pending crisis - these individuals form "cyber cliques" via corporate email.

Why is this important? The study suggests that email patterns can serve as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organization. According to Ronaldo Menezes, one of the study's researchers, "Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful."

This research only starts to hint at the value of having an email archive. By storing all of your email in a central, searchable repository, you can unearth important trends - sometimes without even looking at the contents of the email.

Managers can monitor email communications with key clients to ensure proper follow-up and make sure that your customers are being treated appropriately
Sales managers don't have to miss a beat if one of their sales representatives leaves since their email history can be quickly transferred to another rep
Human resources can ensure that employees are using email appropriately (i.e., devoid of profanity or sexual innuendo) and address potential problem employees proactively (there's something to be said for ye ole sentinel effect)

Curiously, none of these are usually cited as reasons for adopting an email archiving solution. But given time, perhaps they will. I think part of the problem here is that the term "email archive" is a bit of a misnomer as it connotes an impenetrable vault (i.e. a place where emails go to die). But in actuality, email archives are active repositories where messages can be easily searched and retrieved on-demand. In today's information-centric world, email archiving goes way beyond just storing emails and meeting regulatory requirements - it's an organization-wide tool for increasing efficiency.

Email archives can unlock valuable company information and expose trends. This information, in turn, can fuel better customer service, improve the use of email as a professional communication tool and perhaps even foreshadow a coming crisis.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em … VARs Consider Benefits of SaaS

Stephanie O'Neill — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:59:00 GMT

Whether you're drinking the Kool-Aid or shrugging off software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the latest fad, it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon. In fact, according to an estimate from the leading industry analyst firm Gartner, SaaS (also known as cloud computing) will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013.

As more and more companies begin to adopt SaaS, value-added resellers (VARs) must also consider the switch. But the decision is a little more challenging for VARs. First, SaaS requires VARs to completely change their business models, which is no easy feat. Some VARs also feel that SaaS threatens control of their customer relationships. And finally, the SaaS model takes longer to realize profitability, taking VARs from low-volume, high-margin products and services to high-volume, lower-margin sales.

On the upside, however, the quality of earnings with the SaaS model is higher with more predictable, recurring revenues. In addition, although the types of professional services VARs offer may also require some changes with SaaS, there is still a great deal of opportunity to provide value. Data conversions, project management, change management, training, system integration and software customization are still high-demand needs that offer tremendous business value. It's also important to recognize that VARs have a big opportunity to add value to up-and-coming hybrid approaches, for example, LiveOffice's partnership with Mimosa and Microsoft's software-plus-services model.

In the end, VARs need to be flexible and provide solutions their customers want and need. SaaS is a big player, especially in a down economy, and it's getting easier to sell as more and more customers begin to understand it and adopt it. So take notice, VARs, and decide where you see the future of your business. But as Francis Bacon said of innovation, "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator."

Tweeting Financial Advisors? FINRA Rules Apply.

Amy Dugdale — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:14:00 GMT

Anyone who was around the financial services industry in the early 2000's when registered reps and brokers started using email for business remembers the great debate - "What will FINRA say about email?" Today, there's a new question - "What will FINRA say about Twitter?"

Leave it to great tech writer Davis Janowski (@ddjanowski)of InvestmentNews to clear up FINRA's take on tweeting. According to his recent article, "FINRA doesn't believe it's appropriate to make special rules for each new communication tool that becomes available."

"We are very interested in accommodating new technology, but the challenge is to have rules that are both specific enough to address current issues, but broad enough to accommodate evolving technologies and future developments," said Thomas Pappas, FINRA's vice president and director of the advertising regulation department in Rockville, Md. "If we were to write a rule that addresses something too specific, say Western Union telegrams, it wouldn't have taken long before that rule was deemed obsolete," he said.

That means, in order for reps to keep their tweets on the up-and-up, they'd have to be archived and potentially pre-screened (just like websites and emails), which as one of the story sources observes -basically removes the spontaneous nature of social media (i.e. the whole point) from the equation.

Like I said, great article that answers a question many of us in the industry are asking. Certainly there is no question that new technologies pose compliance risks. Here's my take - we weren't sure how we were going to deal with websites back in the mid-90s, we also weren't sure what would happen with email and IM in the early 2000s, but we figured it out (necessity is the mother of invention, right?). Now another communication method is out there - and it's up to tech vendors like us to figure out what we need to develop in order to make Twitter another tool in the quiver of financial services professionals (and all organizations, for that matter).

Game on.

Testing out Twitter? Follow me at @adugdale (recommended if you like celebrity gossip mixed w/ tech observations) or follow our company @liveoffice (recommended if you're interested in finding out what's going on at our org).

*Edit

Check this out: Great blog post on Twitter and Compliance from Doug Cornelius (blogger & CCO at Beacon Capital).

Abracadabra – Emails Begone!

Joe Diamond — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:20:00 GMT

We've come to the point in which it's no longer a surprise when emails just magically vanish from their respective environment. As reported by The News & Observer here, this has happened yet again as James Oblinger, the former chancellor of N.C. State University, had lost six months of high-priority correspondence. These emails have recently become relevant to litigation pertaining to how Oblinger allegedly helped to create a job for First Lady Mary Easley that involved an 88 percent pay increase in one year.

John Woodward, the university's interim chancellor, takes the stance that the university's retention policy calls for the emails to be deleted and that the data wasn't manually removed. N.C. State is now bringing in forensic technicians to determine whether or not any of the data can be recovered.

I'd say that this is all the more reason to have an archiving solution in place while maintaining appropriate retention policies. Granted, if you're in a regulated industry you're generally only required to keep your email for a certain length of time. But would it really hurt to cover all of your bases by keeping it longer? If you've got nothing to hide, you're only protecting yourself and potentially eliminating concerns stressed by potential accusers.

After all, wasn't it just a week ago that I blogged about a similar topic? Raise your hand if you're beginning to tire of emails that vanish faster than David Copperfield. At least in this case, Oblinger didn't opt for the Tyrell S. Drew hand drill method.

The New Deal: Proactive Email Archiving

Dean Nicolls — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:21:00 GMT

It used to be that email archiving was relegated to just financial services companies which were required to archive their email due to regulatory compliance requirements.

But, increasingly, companies of all stripes are discovering its other advantages.

As our inboxes get clogged and our email servers bloat, many organizations are turning to archiving to ‘prune' their on-premise email stores and regain their system's performance. Email archiving solutions solve these storage management headaches by offloading email storage to the cloud or to an on-premise solution.

But, increased email volumes have also resulted in the courts shining a brighter spotlight on email communications. The growing cost of e-discovery, compounded by new regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), has changed the way businesses must deal with email. When email becomes evidence, the ability to quickly search all historical email provides a competitive advantage.

In a recent article on SearchStorage.com ("Email archiving needs soar as e-discovery requests rise"), organizations are deploying email archiving solutions just to be proactive. Miami Country Day School, for instance, has no pending lawsuits and no pressing need for e-discovery capabilities. "But, Donna Lenaghan, the private school's director of technology, said she wanted to be proactive as soon as she learned of the legal requirements through an education technology journal."

Miami Country Day School still hasn't had occasion to use e-discovery capabilities for legal discovery, but they are still getting value out of the archive by providing end users access to their own personal archives. Now, their end users have the tools at their finger tips for locating and restoring inadvertently deleted emails. In the past, ferreting them from backup disks might have taken a day or more.

"It's a very handy day-to-day operation tool," said Lenaghan. "But it's also a peace-of-mind insurance policy if you have a legal issue."

And for organizations who go the hosted email archiving route (vs. opting for an on-premise solution), they can get up and running in hours - not weeks or months. In fact, Lenaghan didn't even consider an in-house email archiving product, because the school's four-person IT staff already has a full plate, with 1,000 students and staff members.

For many resource-strapped IT departments, like Miami Country Day School, the incremental benefits of getting relief from spiraling email storage costs, being able to quickly respond to e-discovery requests, and allowing end-users to restore lost or deleted emails is the icing on the cake. And it's this "icing" that is increasingly putting email archiving at the top of their priority lists.

Hybrids: On-premise and Cloud-based Email Archiving with Mimosa

Nick Mehta — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:37:00 GMT

As some folks know, I previously spent several years in the on-premise email archiving industry. And while I'm now an unabashed fanboy of cloud-based technologies, I've been in both worlds long enough to realize that each model has its trade offs.

On-premise archives provide a number of unique benefits including:

Tight integration with internal systems
Complete control for IT
Archiving of other internal content sources beyond email (e.g., file servers)

In contrast, cloud-based email archiving offers:

Limitless storage and indexing leveraging the economies of scale of the cloud
Flat, predictable pricing
Secure, external access for reviewers

Many customers gravitate fully to one camp or the other. But we are seeing an increasing number of clients interested in achieving the best of both worlds to address a couple of key challenges:

Managing cost to store an ever growing volume of email driven by longer and longer retention periods
Automating export and review of responsive content to parties outside of the company

To this end, today we announced the BETA availability of LiveOffice CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint, an integration with our friends at leading email archiving vendor Mimosa Systems.

CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint automatically pushes some or all of the data from the on-premise NearPoint email archive to LiveOffice's secure cloud-based archive on a regular basis.

This integration, detailed here, gives customers two key benefits.

Benefit 1: Tiered Storage to the Cloud

Older email messages can be aged off of the on-premise archive and stored securely in LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive. In this way, the cost and size of the on-premise archive storage can be capped while maintaining easy access to your content, thereby:

Providing an alternative to new on-premise storage purchases
Automating migration of data between storage platforms as data ages in the archive
Leveraging the unlimited storage pricing model of LiveOffice's archive

Benefit 2: Secure, Open Review through the Cloud

A subset of records can be transferred securely from the on-premise archive to LiveOffice's cloud-based email archive. This eliminates the need for manual exports and shipments from the on-premise archive and allows outside counsel, legal partners or any outside reviewer to search and iterate on a subset of the data in the archive.

For example, imagine that I receive an e-discovery request from outside counsel. Without this solution, I would have to spend time manual exporting the initial data set and copying it to a DVD before shipping it to the requestor. There would likely be subsequent requests to modify the search criteria so I'd have to repeat the export and shipping process again and again. But CloudMerge changes that process entirely. Now, I'm able to seamlessly move each desired data set from the NearPoint archive to the LiveOffice archive on-demand. The requestor is provided with a login and password and is able to access the data set almost instantly (without ever gaining access to my network) and perform their own customized searches.

For more, please check out this page.

Huge thanks to our partners at Mimosa Systems for their collaboration on this venture.

Network Admins Plugin to Email Archiving

Dean Nicolls — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:39:00 GMT

Our team has always believed that the masses should have access to the many benefits that email archiving offers, from streamlining mailbox management to enhancing end user productivity. Today, we're making good on this belief by launching the first-ever email archiving plugin on the Spiceworks platform.

Over the last few months, our engineers have been working to build a plugin (some call it a widget) that can be easily downloaded and instantly deployed by Spiceworks's community of more than 700,000 IT professionals. This development is significant in the email archiving space, here's why:

We've boiled down the email archiving deployment process to a five-click installation - bear in mind that traditional on-site deployment often takes weeks and/or months
We've streamlined the journaling process - you can get up and running in minutes with no intervention from our sales team
We're providing Spiceworks users with 5 free archiving accounts (unlimited storage) - we stand behind the benefits of email archiving and want folks to experience them first-hand without making any kind of commitment

In order to get the plugin, you:

Download the Spiceworks IT Desktop
Install the plugin from the plugin section of the Spiceworks Community

After journaling has been configured, a pie chart (like the one above) displays the number of emails archived per user as well as some helpful stats about email storage. We encourage you to plugin to our email archiving and let us know what you think!

WANTED: Intern W/ Handyman Exp – Must Love Email and Power Tools

Joe Diamond — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:43:00 GMT

A couple of summers ago, that could have been the advertisement posted by the Democratic Department of Information Technology in Mount Holly, part of Dauphin County, for an available internship position.

While many of us talk about our coffee-getting and other entry-level adventures as interns - one took his position as something entirely different. As recent documents reveal, House intern Tyrell S. Drew spent his days erasing computer hard drives and destroying email backup tapes that would later become relevant to the attorney general's investigation into the legislative payroll scandal.

The tools of Drew's trade included a hand drill and a large magnet - both of which are devastating to the delicate nature of a hard drive's internal components. Is it fair to fault an intern for such actions? After all, he was presumably nothing more than an unassuming community college student in search of work experience - and he was only acting on orders from his superiors. It's quite possible that he didn't realize what he was doing was wrong.

But as the regularly-appearing headlines tell us, entire cases now hinge on the admissibility of electronic records (like emails and attachments). These headlines also serve as daily reminders that our government bodies aren't immune to the trials and tribulations brought about by the never-ending influx of data.

This just goes to show you that all organizations need to have some sort of system in place for preserving electronic records.

An Email is Worth a Thousand Words … or Maybe Even More

Amy Dugdale — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:07:00 GMT

Let's be real - in the era of electronic communications, emails are often newsmakers. These days, it's not uncommon for a series of emails to be THE main source for news writers. Take for example a recent CNNMoney.com headline that declared, "Email shows Fed strong-armed BofA." As Bank of America (BofA) CEO Ken Lewis prepared to appear on Capitol Hill last week, this reporter had obtained recently-released emails that "... detail the pressure the Fed put on BofA to complete its merger with Merrill Lynch."

In a single set of emails, we learn:

"Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had suggested to another Fed official that ‘management is gone,' if BofA managers tried to flee the deal and later on needed further government assistance."
"Bernanke called BofA's threat to pull out of the deal a ‘bargaining chip,' saying ‘we do not see it as a very likely scenario.'"
"Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker said that Bernanke considered Bank of America's threat to pull out ‘irrelevant' and ‘not credible.'"

With all that has transpired as a result of our nation's current financial crisis, I imagine this is only the first of many emails that will be analyzed and chronicled by the media. It's also strange to realize that in the decades to come, many of these messages and articles will likely be re-read by our children and grandchildren as they report on the 2009 Economic Crisis to their teachers and classmates.[i]

Or, perhaps only folks who work at archiving companies ponder such things? ;-)

[i]Dugdale, Amy A. "An Email is Worth a Thousand Words ... or Maybe Even More." Weblog post. LiveOffice Blog. 17 June 2009. 17 June 2009 http://blog.liveoffice.com/.

Even Google Is Addicted to Outlook

Nick Mehta — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:20:00 GMT

In my various wanderings, there seem to be two categories of people in the business world:

The people that believe that everything-Microsoft is dead, including all Microsoft-related email technology.
The 100 MM+ silent majority of us that still can't live without Microsoft Outlook.

While I think gmail is a revolutionary concept, product and business that will dramatically change the world of collaboration, I also know that Outlook isn't going away any time soon.

Apparently, Google agrees. Today, they announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

Per Google's blog:

Many business users prefer Gmail's interface and features to products they've used in the past. But sometimes there are people who just love Outlook.

Our thesis has been for some time that many customers want the simplicity of management, unlimited email storage and powerful search found in systems like gmail combined with the Microsoft look and feel and integration. Good to see Google feeling the same way.

Who Says You Can’t Live on a Cloud?

Stephanie O'Neill — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:17:00 GMT

It's amazing to me how far technology has come in the past 15 years. At the risk of embarrassing myself, I admit I was a late bloomer when it came to technology. I made it through college using a Brother word processor, which consisted of a typewriter and a pseudo-computer screen with lovely green type, and I thought it was pretty cool. I didn't touch a computer (a very old Mac with a tiny, nine-inch screen) until my first job, and that was more than daunting. Then there was this thing called email, another foreign anomaly in my young professional life. It wasn't long after my introduction to the computer and email that I got my first cell phone, one of the largest known to man. I don't even think I used the Internet until the late 90s. But that was then ...

Today, I couldn't live without my computer, email, the Internet and cell phone technology. In the early 90s, I never would have imagined I'd be working in the tech industry, pitching the benefits of HP wares before finding myself in this burgeoning industry called "cloud computing." But I am a firm believer in the benefits of technology, and the sky is the limit - literally.

Cloud computing isn't just a fly-by-night operation. I believe it is the new wave of the future. And it makes perfect sense. If you look at the history of technology, innovators have always found ways to make things more efficient, reduce costs, expand features and simplify functionality for end users. Businesses are looking for ways to achieve the same things, especially in a down economy, and cloud computing is the right solution, delivered in a convenient and customizable package, where the possibilities are endless. More and more companies are building their mobile workforces and allowing staff the option of telecommuting, so providing employees with the flexibility to access information anytime, anywhere is a good thing for everyone.

But you don't just have to take my word for it. Leading industry analyst firm Gartner predicts that cloud computing will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013, and many of the big guys are taking notice - Microsoft, HP, IBM and SAP, to name a few.

Remember when the Internet was destined to fail? There will always be naysayers, but I think cloud computing is here to stay. We've only begun to scratch the surface of the next big thing technology has put at our fingertips.

More smart phones (iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre) = more dumb email

Nick Mehta — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:25:00 GMT

While Barack Obama and I relentlessly cling to our Blackberries, I'm sure both of us are equally-impressed with the pace of innovation in the smartphone market.

From the Palm Pre announced last week to the iPhone 3GS unveiled today, it seems like the market for Internet-connected phones is flipping on its head every quarter.

And with every release, it's more and more clear that the money today is in business users and specifically in better support for Microsoft Exchange.

It's all very exciting to watch. But from our seat in the email archiving world, millions more email-enabled mobile devices means billions of additional email messages to store, retain and search.

And I don't know about you but "Sent from a [] handheld" often means that the sender didn't have much time to think about that message before sending it. It will be interesting to see what percentage of E-Discovery requests five years from now are related to messages of increasingly-questionable judgment sent from increasingly-"smart" phones.

Digital Voicemail: Convenience or Compliance Risk?

Stephanie O'Neill — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:14:00 GMT

While convenient new technologies seem to emerge by the minute, compliance departments are continually plagued by the challenges they present. More than ever, many closely regulated industries are under a microscope-especially financial services. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) expects its member firms to have policies and procedures in place to "monitor all electronic communications technology used by the firm and its associated persons to conduct the firm's business." Although email has been the primary focus of such regulations to date, more and more new technologies are coming into play.

So where does digital voicemail fit in? The short answer: digital voicemail is discoverable, and you should be prepared to handle it no differently than email when it comes to compliance.

No matter what type of voicemail system you have, the way the associated data is retained is likely under your control, which means it must adhere to your data backup and retention polices. Although unified messaging solutions are convenient, often delivering voicemail message notifications and audio files directly to your email inbox, they tend to pose the most challenges when it comes to retention and discovery. Some regulations, such as amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, specifically callout "sound recordings" and specify that they must be reasonably accessible and not burdensome to produce (see FRCP Rule 26 and Rule 34); however, more and more courts are not accepting accessibility or financial burden as an excuse for failing to provide relevant data during discovery (see eDiscovery & Compliance Considerations with Unified Messaging).

Unfortunately, very few companies are prepared for discovery of digital voicemail and other audio files, which could end up costing them a significant amount if they end up in litigation. When it comes to discovery, it's only a matter of time until voicemail and other audio files are just as common as email communications. Whether you're prepared or not, your compliance obligations are expanding. Companies must ultimately assess their own risk and determine the best course of action to meet their specific compliance needs, but a little preparation goes a long way.

The Cyber Tea Party of 2011?

Amy Dugdale — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:01:00 GMT

Visions of my U.S. history class in high school are coming back to me - "No taxation without representation" and so on and so forth. These flashbacks are courtesy of New York Times' blogger Tom Kuntz whose recent idea of the day was - "A tax on e-mail would stem the deluge of spam - and both free up and help pay for the bandwidth that the Internet needs to grow."

To be fair, the idea was proposed by Edward Gottesman in Prospe ct, a British magazine. His argument is that taxing emails would result in a drastic reduction in the amount of spam we receive. Fair enough - he maintains the funds could be used "to finance the expansion of bandwidth that the Web desperately needs." And let's face it, bandwidth isn't cheap.

While I must admit that it's an interesting idea, I can already envision the revolt now. Frustrated self-employed and small business owners throwing their computers out their office windows in protest ... ok, maybe that's too far-fetched. But I can only imagine the heated debate that would emerge if email were to be taxed. I guess the best I can do for now is grab a cup of tea and see what happens next.

One Man's Take On Security in the Cloud

Dhaivat Pandit — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:49:00 GMT

An article on Network World caught my attention - a surprisingly decent addition to the ongoing debate about security concerns with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. I realize that it's a legitimate concern, unlike those of which pertaining to global warming.

Genetically designed to be skeptical of any buzzwords, I accept that cloud services need more scrutiny. The only entity that knows more about my personal tendencies is my email account, and naturally I want it to be secure. I shudder to think what it takes to entrust your billing, operations or human resources needs to a third party vendor. When the services we're talking about are email archiving and compliance, I can totally see where the general feeling of skepticism comes from.

From the viewpoint of a cloud-based company, I can say that we're all too aware of what's at risk and that we work tirelessly to ensure that we can provide a service that is secure and reliable. As Jon Brodkin mentioned in his article, multi-tenancy is an integral component of cloud computing services. You can be at ease knowing that we take every measure possible to ensure that you and ONLY you can see what belongs to... you. To quote John Hammond from Jurassic Park, "No expense is spared."

White House Email: Coming to a Theatre Near You

Amy Dugdale — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:33:00 GMT

As CNN reported yesterday, the Bush White House doesn't have to turn over email records. According to the story,

[A] three-judge panel in Washington concluded the Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act over disclosure of its documents because "it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the President and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial and independent authority."

This case and the "missing" emails have been long-standing headline makers over the last few years. Watching each development has given many of us in the messaging industry our own little soap opera to follow (with plot twists and turns almost good enough for Hollywood). From the disclosure that the emails were lost due to an archiving hardware failure to the day that the emails were mysteriously "found" - each episode leaves us biting our nails and wondering what's next. Now we've got a ruling in the ongoing lawsuit filed by private groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). What's next? The long-awaited sequel to Tom Hanks' "You've Got Mail" - "Dude, Where's My Email?"

Think Twice Before You Delete That Email…

Joe Diamond — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:06:00 GMT

If you follow Andrea Coombes' advice in her recent Wall Street Journal write-up, you may find yourself in some hot water the next time you search your inbox for an email. She suggests that, "If you can deal with the email in two minutes or less, do it and delete it." My question is this - what happens when, for whatever reason, you need to call upon that message again and it's not there? What if that particular thread of communication becomes relevant to pending litigation and it's gone forever? You may want to keep these questions in mind, especially if you're not familiar with your office's backup practices.

As Coombes' article notes, it's no secret that as the Internet continues to mature, we're going to be bombarded with more information than ever before. According to the 2003 report "How Much Information?", 63 percent of the U.S. work force receives 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages and more. As dated as this report is, it's safe to assume that number has doubled in the past six years.

So, how are we going to handle the influx of information in our digital mailboxes?

Take our CEO Nick Mehta for example. He subscribes to Coombes' advice and is a founding member of the "respond, file, or delete it" club, but there's a huge caveat. He deletes liberally because all of his emails are being archived. While his inbox remains pristine, his deleted messages are just a click away in his personal archive folder.

The bottom line is that there are tools out there that can help manage the increased load of information. Don't go it alone and most importantly, don't blindly delete emails that are seemingly inconsequential today. That "2-minute and done" message may be the one that saves you from a lawsuit down the road.

Leveraging the Cloud to Power through the Economic Crisis

Dean Nicolls — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:23:00 GMT

In a recent study by Savvis, they describe how a new breed of IT leaders is leveraging cloud computing to realize short-term cost savings and improved efficiency. The study was conducted in January of this year with more than 300 IT leaders in mid-to-large enterprises in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.

The findings reiterated what most of us already know - most companies and their IT departments are struggling to find solid financial ground in the current economic crisis. In fact, IDC recently changed its earlier predictions about worldwide IT spending in 2009, revising its estimate of 2.6 percent growth to just 0.5 percent.

Amidst this backdrop, it was also clear from the study that this new breed of IT professionals has some fresh characteristics - they are nimble, forward-thinking and view technology as a strategic enabler. Now more than ever, IT leaders have to continue innovating, creating competitive advantages and must maintain a "lean and mean" corporate physique to remain aggressive in the marketplace.

So, how and where is this innovation coming from?

With 52 percent of all IT leaders globally seeing their cost savings derived from reducing infrastructure costs, a real opportunity exists for them to re-evaluate their existing IT infrastructure and consider a different approach that will have both short and long-term benefits.

The study then went on to divide the respondents into two camps: one camp (49 percent of all respondents) said that their organization is not doing well; the other camp (surprisingly 51 percent of those surveyed) who think that their companies are doing "well" or "very well" and are continuing to grow despite the global recession. Here are some of the characteristics of the better-performing organizations.

Leverage cloud computing: 72 percent of all IT leaders believe cloud computing will play an important role in the future of IT and will help companies gain efficiencies and reduce costs.

Spend more on IT: The IT leaders who are enabling their companies to do well spend 18 percent more of their revenue on IT than those who don't.

Focus on infrastructure outsourcing: These successful companies spend a significant amount more - up to 32 percent more - of their IT budgets on infrastructure outsourcing.

These innovators are far more likely to consider consolidating and outsourcing the number of IT suppliers. As a result, they are able to re-direct staff into more business-critical areas, improve accountability and focus on the long-term while dealing with the day-to-day tactical issues.

As the paper concludes: "Investigating some of the options that successful IT leaders are pursuing: using IT as a strategic tool; asking "What does IT enable?" rather than "What does IT cost?" and focusing on delivering competitive advantage will put IT executives in a strong position. Exploring options to consolidate and re-organize your IT infrastructure and being open to innovative approaches, offers and strategies from reputable vendors may well be the key to achieving this."

We couldn't agree more.

Oh Yes, Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman

Amy Dugdale — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:54:00 GMT

As the Los Angeles Times reported, stamp prices were raised again this week. From what I can tell, the reaction was mixed:

Some people cared (a lot)
Some folks couldn't care less (maybe they bought a gross of Forever Stamps a year ago?)
Others had no idea (maybe they only communicate via email and pay all of their bills online?)

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it's certainly an interesting commentary on the essential role email now plays in our personal and professional lives. There are a large number of folks out there who are now so fully dependent on email and the Internet that it doesn't matter to them that stamp prices have gone up four times in four years (disclosure: I'm in this camp).

Interestingly, a spokesperson for the United States Postal Service (USPS) was quick to say that they don't believe the price of stamps will drive more people to email (since we're all paying for Internet access already) -

"I don't think its price that drives people to email because they're paying an email provider also for the service, so ultimately, there is a cost to your bill payments online as well. I think that people like to use different media in different ways and we have got to at the postal service respond accordingly," said Maureen Marion, a spokesperson for the United States Postal Service.

Does this mean that three things are certain in life now - death, taxes and postage stamp increases? Well, wait - I do work at an email storage company so I guess I need to add a 4^th certainty - growing email storage needs.

Are you an Emailaholic?

Joe Diamond — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:44:00 GMT

Do you find yourself shaking uncontrollably if you're detached from your mobile device? Do you have cold sweats if you miss out on Woot's email notifications announcing the deal of the day? Did you miss your daughter's ballet recital in favor of feverishly responding to the dozens of nonsensical messages you receive on a daily basis? If so, you may be an emailaholic and I'd like to welcome you to the club.

Check out this recent study -

"Small worlds expert Duncan Watts at Yahoo! Research in New York City and a few pals studied the time of day at which around 3,000 individuals at a European university sent emails over an 83-day period as well as the email habits of over 122,000 e-mailers at a US university over a 2-year period."

Not surprisingly, Watts found that a significant number of individuals possess an insatiable appetite for email and continued to send messages throughout all of their waking hours. This group, referred to as emailaholics, clearly thinks of email as a sport - one of which requires utter domination! The second group, fancifully known as the "day labourers" handles most of their email activities during typical working hours.

I KNEW there was a clinical diagnosis for my condition and that my doctor was holding out on me. Recommended treatment - a caffeinated Diet Dr. Pepper to keep me awake so I can email even more - oh, and a lifetime membership in the emailaholics club ;-)

Pretty interesting report, you can read it all here.

Hedge Fund Industry: Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes …

Amy Dugdale — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:19:00 GMT

As a vendor of compliance-related services - it's our job to keep up on the regulations. So that's why we've been keeping a close eye on the debate over and legislation surrounding hedge fund registration. We were around in 2006 when the ruling was passed and then subsequently vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

But with the recent financial scandals - what's old is new again. While the Senate is looking closely at the Hedge Fund Transparency Act proposed by Senators Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Carl Levin, D-Mich in January of this year, Congress is now focused on HR 711. This bill, sponsored by Reps. Michael Capuano, D-Mass. and Michael Castle, R-Del. requires hedge fund managers to register as investment advisers.

According to an article in Securities Industry News, there are big developments with HR 711. The Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) and Managed Funds Association (MFA) announced that they will support "registration of investment managers - including hedge fund managers - with the Securities and Exchange Commission."

As the article notes,

"Such a process of registration ... creates a relationship and dialogue which supports greater understanding of hedge fund activities," AIMA chairman W. Todd Groome told the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets [late last week].

However the article goes on to say that some in the hedge fund industry don't think HR 711 goes quite far enough ...

At the hearing, James Chanos, chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, noted that hedge funds lost an average of 18.3 percent last year--their worst performance since 1990--as assets fell from $1.93 trillion to $1.41 trillion. Chanos said he does not think registration as envisioned by the House bill will provide needed protections. "Using the Advisers Act as the basic template for regulation will ultimately prove ineffective to mitigate systemic risk," he said. "We believe that the twin goals of improved investor protection and enhanced systemic oversight could be better achieved with a stand-alone statute tailored for private investment funds."

"We cannot have major players in the financial world operating completely in the dark and answerable to no one," said Capuano. "This bill is simply a beginning."

I couldn't say it any better myself, what a beginning indeed. And, so the debate continues. It will certainly be interesting to watch this story unfold in the coming months.

Raising the Red Flag on Identity Theft in Healthcare

Amy Dugdale — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:41:00 GMT

Take note - the red flag on identity theft in the healthcare industry has been raised! We've been receiving more and more calls from our clients in the healthcare industry asking us to get their email encryption turned on (and fast!).

Clearly, healthcare providers are taking their compliance with the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) Red Flags Rule seriously. These rules, which are designed to prevent identity theft, went into effect for the healthcare industry a week ago. But wait - hasn't HIPAA always required providers to encrypt patient information (e.g. in email messages and/or attachments) transmitted via the Internet? The answer is "yes." But what's different with the Red Flags rule is that many healthcare providers believe it will be more strictly enforced than HIPAA.

What are other healthcare providers or compliance vendors out there seeing? Are you (or your clients) more concerned about complying with the Red Flags rule or HIPAA requirements? Or do you view them as one in the same?

Image Source: Wikipedia Commons

Don’t try pleading ignorant – Part II

Dean Nicolls — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:43:00 GMT

I began my first post by introducing the challenges faced throughout E-Discovery in terms of processes, so now we'll talk about the technology aspect.

On the technology front, you need a simple way to collect and index this information. When it comes to email, tape backups just don't cut it, since they can degrade over time (given that we're talking about physical media), and there's no easy way to perform intelligent searches. For example, say you want to get all of the email between John and Susie from January 2008 through April 15, 2009. With email archiving solutions, whether they be SaaS-based (hosted) or on-premise, all email and attachments are typically indexed when they are ingested into the archive, so you can easily search and quickly find relevant email threads. The ability to do your own searches and cull the list of potentially relevant email can literally save you tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses. And, as an added benefit, you are in a much better position to evaluate the legal merits of cases, claims and likely defenses.

Keep this in mind. E-Discovery is by far the most significant cost driver when evidence in a case involves a large volume of electronically stored information (ESI). Accumulating data throughout the e-discovery process is inherently time consuming and costly. Locating the relevant data, collecting it and then preparing it for review by legal counsel are all integral parts of the routine. The most expensive part of that process is the cost of human review, which is driven by the number of documents requiring review, the hourly rate and the efficiency of the reviewers. This underscores the importance of creating and enforcing sound email-retention policies, storing your email in a central, searchable repository and ensuring that your company can quickly comply with discovery requests.

The demands of e-discovery now require companies and their attorneys to have a rudimentary understanding email archiving technology in order to increase their odds of mounting a successful and cost-effective defense. At a minimum, this'll at least help to avoid having your case thrown out because of ESI mismanagement.

The Odd Couple 2009: The Lawyer and the IT Administrator

Nick Mehta — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:38:00 GMT

I remember watching The Odd Couple reruns as a kid, struggling to decide if I wanted to grow up to be Felix Unger or Oscar Madison. Being a sportswriter is probably more my style than being a photographer, but I wasn't sure I could deal with the mess.

As luck would have it, I ended up going into archiving instead: not nearly as cool or sitcom-worthy, but still pretty messy.

In particular, it's astonishing to me how much of the challenge of archiving, records management, E-Discovery and data management in general revolves around the fundamental differences between IT professionals and lawyers in typical organizations.

Think about it. Law is all about the gray areas while IT is pretty black and white (servers are up or they are down). Law is all about nuances while IT is pretty blunt. Legal wardrobes are pretty nice... you get my point.

Where the Odd Couple really comes out is in email archiving and E-Discovery, in that IT and legal must sit together and make tough decisions (e.g., how long should I keep my email). IT and legal are now being forced to talk more than they ever have before.

As Debra Logan at analyst firm Gartner Group points out, in many cases, though they may be talking, they still are not communicating:

Those aren't dialogs, they are lazy cop-outs and/or a grave lack of understanding of what really needs to happen. I used the word grave with intent. Not understanding technology is becoming a handicap for lawyers and indeed at least one high profile Magistrate Judge has stated that lawyers need to understand technology to do their jobs. Electronically stored information is now the predominate form of business record. Lawyers (partners, not junior associate spear carrying types) who know this area stress the need for involvement from senior litigators, because e-Discovery can often be a strategic issue in preparing a case.

Beyond communication breakdowns, however, many of the problems are simply around conflicting incentives. While IT professionals are driven to minimize one risk (management and users getting upset), legal often tries to minimize another (lawsuits, fines, etc.). In some cases, these risks are at odds with each other.

The good news is that things are changing because E-Discovery is forcing more alignment. The bad news is that the change isn't always easy or pretty. Do I smell a new reality TV series?

Don’t try pleading ignorant – Part I

Dean Nicolls — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:08:00 GMT

The following stat stopped me in my tracks.

According to Kroll Ontrack, more than half of the approximately 138 reported electronic discovery rulings (issued in the U.S. in the first 10 months of last year) addressed court-ordered sanctions, data production and preservation, and spoliation issues of ESI (electronically stored information). Increasingly, judges can and will hand out sanctions for mishandling ESI and not providing clear policies for document retention.

The challenge for many companies facing litigation is just the sheer volume of electronic data out there. In today's electronic age, 90% of documents are no longer printed on paper. And email has become one of the biggest sources of ESI as well as one of its biggest challenges. So how can your company be prepared should it face some type of litigation? Part of the solution involves process. Part of the solution involves technology. The former is discussed below and the latter will be the focal point of part II.

On the process front, you need to determine which ESI you plan to retain and for how long. So, let's look at email for the time being.

In highly regulated industries, your retention periods are defined for you by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and/or the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). With the 2006 amendments to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, ANY company with the potential to be involved in federal litigation (i.e. most companies) should already have a plan in place on how they plan to collect, retain and ultimately dispose of email based on predetermined retention policies. Their email administrator will also thank them for this.

However, policies need to go beyond words. They must be enforced. Courts have taken a dim view on companies that have email policies on the books, but then enforce them in an inconsistent manner. In addition, you need to have a plan on how you intend to retrieve email in the event of legal discovery. But, above all else, there should be a formalized process in place to preserve email via legal holds. In fact, not having such a plan has been the undoing of many corporate defenses in recent years.

My next blog will discuss the items to consider on the technology front...

WHOA! You’ve got archiving in the cloud all wrong…

Dhaivat Pandit — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:36:00 GMT

I recently stumbled upon an interesting article on CNN Money and as a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, felt like saying a word or two.

Take this scenario for example. A typical small and medium business (SMB) such as an investment firm with roughly 50 employees is looking for an email archiving solution to address their storage needs. They'll have to choose between a traditional on-premise archiving solution or go through a "hip" SaaS provider.

When considering an on-premise solution, the following fixed costs should be considered:

Software

License(s)
Support and upgrades
Implementation
Health Check
Training

Hardware

Server(s)
Primary storage
Disaster recovery storage
Disaster recovery bandwidth
Maintenance
Space, power, heating and cooling

Personnel

Through the use of our nifty total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator, we can come up with some ballpark numbers for an on-premise solution which are shown below.

Now let's take a look at the TCO for a SaaS-based email archiving solution, which includes the following costs:

* Software Costs

o License
o Implementation

And just to be sure, let's compare the two results.

This case uses only 50 users, but even if we had 500, the savings are significant.

I could just let the numbers do the talking, but just as a last few last words, SaaS is not something the software industry came up with overnight (we are not THAT good). It has been around forever and is used in most industries such as travel (Travel-as-a-Service) and healthcare (Medicare-as-a-Service).

Think about the world without TaaS, to travel from LA to NYC we'll have the following options:

* Call an airline and eventually place an order for your ticket after being on hold for 15 minutes
* Buy a Gulfstream G5 and fly to NYC (Hey, a guy can dream)

But with TaaS, we can buy a JetBlue ticket online and hop on a plane that same day. And you even get free DirecTV. Maybe we should start offering that with our service, too.

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud...

Nick Mehta — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:20:00 GMT

LiveOffice has been offering hosted email archiving services since 2001. As such, we have evolved and grown under the radar, while the media constantly found new names for what we and our brethren do, including:

Hosting
Application Service Providers (ASPs - remember those?)
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Cloud Computing

While each term truly has its own unique nuances, our business model itself has remained pretty consistent:

No software or hardware to buy, deploy or manage
Predictable pricing per user per month
Securely delivered over the Internet
Automatically patched and updated

Since cloud computing is the latest label for our industry, we are now going through the predictable hype cycle that all of us have seen many times before:

Initially: This could be big
Shortly thereafter: This is going to change everything
Around the same time: Everyone is going to use this
Upon reflection: Well actually, no one is going to use this
At the same time (from the other side): No wait, some people will use this and are using this
Much later: Wow, almost everyone is actually using this

Think about it. Remember the articles you read about the Internet in 1995? The initial predictions were overblown. Then people said it was dead and a fad during the dotcom crash. And now look at how it has blown past most of our wildest imaginations.

In the same way, businesses leveraging externally-hosted IT solutions, versus running IT systems themselves (which is what hosting/ASPs/SaaS/cloud computing really is) is going through the same natural evolution.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. recently released a report on cloud computing throwing water on the flames of the hype. One of the key findings, that generated tremendous controversy, was as follows:

Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises

As someone benefiting from the growth in cloud computing, you know what my response is to that? I agree. 100%.

It's obvious, isn't it? Cloud computing is a new area and, by definition, "hurdles" will need to be overcome. If there were no hurdles, it would not be new. I'm not sure why that is surprising to anyone.

In fact, I believe in this trend so much that I want the hype to be contained, because the hype obscures the real trends taking place under the covers - namely:

Small and medium-sized businesses have largely had no good options when it comes to IT infrastructure, given their scale and expertise. Cloud computing finally levels the playing field. And although "small" business sounds like a tiny market, it's anything but that.
At the same time, I am amazed by the number of large companies who, despite knowing all of the hurdles and barriers alluded to above, are still finding cloud-based solutions to be worth the trade off.

So let's get the cloud computing hype over with, because the reality is too promising for us to ignore.

E-Discovery powers through the downturn

Nick Mehta — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:59:00 GMT

Clearwell Systems, a leading E-Discovery software vendor, reported 250% revenue growth and its first quarter of profitability, last week.

We at LiveOffice think highly of the Clearwell solution and find it to be very complementary to our email archiving software-as-a-service offerings.

But beyond feeling happiness for our friends and for some positive news during the recession, I am amazed at how much vendors in the email archiving and E-Discovery spaces are reporting continued growth despite the economic headwinds.

As we reported previously, our Q4 2008 was up 148% year-over-year. In addition, our Q1 2009 was a record in terms of revenue and number of transactions. Finally, as we have been for many years, we continue to be profitable each quarter.

And as I talk to my friends in the overall space of archiving and E-Discovery, I continue to hear similar stories. Customers are finding ways to keep these projects going because they save hard dollars and in some ways are becoming more important, with the increased regulatory scrutiny and litigation coming from the events of the past year.

Fight for your Rights

Nick Mehta — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:43:00 GMT

Last week, we announced our new LiveOffice Client Bill of Rights for our current and prospective customers.

Any organization thinking about email compliance, email discovery and email hosting in a software-as-a-service model understandably would have a number of questions and concerns around issues like service availability, data ownership and system security. We wanted to address these head-on and be as transparent as possible.

But beyond that, Brian Babineau, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, pointed out another important fact on his blog:

This is a very unique way to communicate a company's mission statement, core values, and strategy to multiple audiences - customers, employees, press, analysts, investors, etc.

As Brian points out, for us internally at LiveOffice, this list was really about having a consistent vision to rally around and measure ourselves against.

Michael Osterman, at MessagingWire, points out what we've believed for a long time - that SaaS is about service as much as it is about software:

I wouldn't go so far as to say the rights enumerated by LiveOffice are overly innovative, but they do codify a focus on good customer service. This will be important for many decision makers as they evaluate SaaS-based services, a model in which we have seen substantial growth in customer interest over the past six months, driven in large part by economic pressures that are motivating decision makers to reduce costs wherever they can.

We know we have to continue to do a lot to live up to these rights, but they help us focus on what's important, so we are excited about them.

Coming soon to a server room near you, Exchange 2010

Nick Mehta — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:18:00 GMT

Having been in the software business for a long time, I have great admiration for the Microsoft Exchange team in general for how they are able to innovate in the scope of such a huge and complicated product. As they announced today, they are doing it again with Exchange 2010, which is now in BETA.

Exchange 2010 looks like it will move the ball forward greatly in terms of email management, including:

Great user productivity features such as MailTips to allow you to see if an email recipient is out of the office before sending a note, voicemail text preview and the ability to ignore (or "mute") conversation threads so you don't see them (this one is going to be VERY popular :) ).
Improved disk I/O, allowing companies (and hosting providers) to use cheaper (SATA) drives for Exchange.
A new mailbox move function that can operate online and rapidly without user downtime.
Improved administrative capabilties for the PowerShell command language, including remote administration.

For a comprehensive, more detailed Exchange 2010 feature list, check out Martin Tuip's listing at archiving101.com. And definitely check out PC Magazine's review of the Exchange 2010 release.

In addition, and relevant to us, Microsoft markets a new "archiving" feature:

"Protect information and meet compliance requirements with the new e-mail archive. As e-mail volume grows, companies must address increasing compliance, legal and e-discovery concerns, but today, according to Osterman Research, only 28 percent of organizations currently archive their e-mail content (Osterman Research, 2008). Exchange 2010 introduces an integrated e-mail archive. The new solution makes it easier to store and query e-mail across the organization using the Exchange software that organizations already know and use."

Specifically, Microsoft will allow customers to have user PST files backed up to the Exchange server.

Obviously everyone is naturally going to ask, "what does Exchange 2010 mean for email archiving vendors like LiveOffice?"

We are going to spend time pouring over Exchange 2010's BETA and will have more to share, but I'll say a few things:

I remember Exchange 2007's release and being surprised / scared by Exchange 2007 supposedly having:

Faster I/O to allow you to use SATA drives
Email archiving and records management
Multi-mailbox search

Sound familiar? Interestingly enough, Microsoft is trying it again with Exchange 2010.
Did they slip up before? No - it's just that this space (email archiving) is a lot of work for anyone.
In particular, Microsoft will run into the same challenges everyone has with email archiving - it's not easy to store, index and search billions of email messages.
By the way, archiving at scale is a lot more than backing up PST files, as most folks who have designed or implemented archiving systems would know.

Despite the inevitable hype cycle that will surround Exchange 2010, we are all excited to see Microsoft continue to reshape the electronic communciations landscape.

Cloud storage services review includes email archiving

Nick Mehta — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:38:00 GMT

bMighty recently published a comprehensive review of cloud-based storage services. In general, with all of the hype around cloud computing, many customers are finding that storage is a great place to start (whether primary storage, backup, archiving or other services), since it is typically an infinitely-growing area that is still very complex to manage.

bMighty highlighted LiveOffice's cloud-based email archiving service in the review:

E-mail can be one of the most daunting challenges that a small or midsize business will face. The broadest need is simply in the area of e-mail management. The cost of adding storage to an ever-expanding e-mail store or the resistance to restricted mailbox size leaves the typical business owner in a quandary. Not only is e-mail storage management expensive, but it exacts a toll on backups and e-mail server performance. A viable option may be to use a cloud storage provider like LiveOffice and shift the burden elsewhere.

Gartner: Cloudy days ahead for on-premise email tools

Nick Mehta — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:28:00 GMT

As organizations move their email systems into the cloud, to systems like Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007, what does that mean for the various add-on tools used in the email environment (e.g., email security, email backup, etc.)?

Gartner recently published a report forecasting tough times ahead for on-premise email tools:

The analyst house has suggested that expected pace of adoption of e-mail software as a service platforms threatens the livelihood of the vast e-mail third-party vendor community.
Hardest hit will be applications which help protect, secure and stabilise e-mail systems, it has said.
Gartner has described how vendors currently providing some of the premises-based systems that are not necessary for SaaS implementations could be impacted by the shift in favour of software services.

We're excited to help clients in this transition, enabling them to start with cloud-based email archiving and email disaster recovery and then moving them to cloud-based email itself.

Can I have another mulligan? EMC resets archiving strategy... again

Nick Mehta — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:37:00 GMT

EMC relaunched its email archiving strategy last week under the brand name SourceOne.

EMC is not a company to be taken lightly. EMC has truly revolutionized the IT industry over the past twenty years - whether by innovation (its Symmetrix storage line defined the new standard for highly-available storage in the 1990s), integration (it does a great job of marketing the overall portfolio) or just plain good luck (see VMware acquisition).

Unfortunately, in the email archiving space, EMC has not knocked it out of the park.

While they should have been #1 in the space, based upon their utter dominance in storage and early innovation with the archiving-focused EMC Centera storage product line, EMC took one of the early innovators in archiving (EmailXtender, from its Legato acquisition) and faltered early. EX (as the product became known) was renown for 1000s of licenses sold and very little in terms of actual usage.

EMC then attempted to redefine the industry by merging EX with its Documentum content management product line. I recall competitors and analysts telling me in 2004 that email archiving was just a "feature" and would soon merge into Enterprise Content Management suites like Documentum. To this end, EMC released Documentum Archiving Services for Email (with the catchy acronym, DASE) in 2006.

I remember EMC's press release calling DASE "The World's First Enterprise-Class Archiving Software," which obviously made Legato EmailXtender an ugly, "non-enterprise-class" cast-off, despite its huge installed base in enterprises. Unfortunately for EMC, DASE had a great "platform" (whatever that means), yet lacked even the most basic of archiving functionality. Worse yet, EMC sent out mixed signals about the future of the two product lines (DASE and EX) and how to migrate between them.

At the time, I was working on the Enterprise Vault business at Symantec and remember that it felt like EMC was offering us up an early holiday gift with the announcement. Customers choosing between EMC and Symantec were even easier to convince than ever before.

SourceOne appears to have fixed many of the holes in terms of EMC's archiving functionality. However, I think EMC has a long way to go to regain market credibility in this space.

Symantec recently put out an open letter to EMC customers, spurred by this EMC announcement, which I thought was an interesting read. Symantec clearly has a big lead in the market and EMC has a lot of catching up to do.

One of the many things that I love about hosted email archiving (and other software-as-a-service) is that disruptive product upgrades, like EMC's above, rarely happen.

Customers get new functionality in bite-sized chunks, rather than in big binges every few years. For many organizations, this "feature snacking" is a lot easier to digest.

Make sure your archive doesn't turn into Hotel California

Nick Mehta — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:29:00 GMT

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

While Don Henley of The Eagles probably wasn't talking about email archiving when he sang the lyrics to "Hotel California," his words ring true to anyone who has been through an email archiving migration.

Since we started offering the Troubled Archive Relief Program to help save customers from failed on-premise email archiving deployments, we have seen how many challenges come into play when clients actually try to move between systems.

One of those challenges, as Bob Spurzem points out on the Ferris Research blog, is around stubbing.

Stubbing, for those of you that don't know, is a feature of some email archiving solutions where items in the email server (e.g., email messages with attachments in Microsoft Exchange) are replaced, in the process of archiving, by smaller items that redirect the user to the original item in the archive. The concept is that this shrinks the size of the email database by moving most of the data to the archive, while the user still has a pointer in his or her inbox.

While we've written about some of the performance tradeoffs of stubbing previously, we have seen that stubs often make it much harder for a client to migrate off of a given archiving solution.

Why does migration matter? Simply put, most organizations intend to archive email for 3, 5, 7 years or more. The reality of software and hardware is that in many cases, companies will have to migrate between solutions sooner than that - whether because of product performance issues, new functionality from another vendor, vendor viability issues or your organization getting acquired by another group with an existing archive. So buyers should absolutely plan deployments with the "exit strategy" understood.

Why do stubs create a challenge here? Basically, over multiple years, the email server will fill up with stubs as messages are archived. Without the archive, the stubs are completely useless. So if a company migrated its archiving data but left its stubs in place, users would be unable to use the vast majority of items in their inbox. Literally, they would get a confusing error when they tried to click on items.

How do you recover? The standard method is to restore all of the stubs back into the email server prior to migration. But think about this for a second. Imagine a 3 year archive and 3 years worth of stubs. You used the stubs to shrink the average mailbox to, let's say, 500 MB of stubs. But those stubs might represent (using a 10:1 ratio), 5 GB of space. Do you have temporary space in your email environment for a 10:1 increase in storage during the migration? Will your email server even handle it?

As I've said before, stubs are neither good nor bad - stubs represent a tradeoff. But one of the downsides to keep in mind is that they make it harder to "check out any time you like."

My Inbox is Empty (oh yeah, that's right!)

Amy Dugdale — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:23:00 GMT

In a recent New York Times article, Farhad Manjoo offers some insightful tips on how to keep an empty inbox (or just a few email messages). While I realize this is just a pipe dream for many, I'm here to tell you I'm living it, and it's awesome.

What's my secret? As any good tech vendor should, we eat our own "dog food," i.e., we use our Mail Archive solution internally. All messages I send and receive in any given day are automatically stored in my "Personal Archive" folder in my inbox. Anytime I need an old message, I just click on the folder and search for whatever message I need.

Along with my cluttered inbox, a few other things are now history for me, including:

Mailbox quotas - that hated "Your Mailbox is Full" pop-up box no longer appears as the unfair referee in the midst of my daily barrage of sent emails (with "enormous"-as Outlook calls them-attachments)
Frantic calls to IT re. lost emails - while I adore our desktop support manager, in the grand scheme of his daily duties, he has no interest in helping me find a message I deleted or "lost." I have officially entered the world of email self-restoration, and it is paradise. (Julio - the next time I have a PC issue, I hereby publicly promise to hit restart BEFORE I call you)
Saving emails locally - gone are the days of the devious local PST file save. I'm no longer hitting any kind of quota, so I don't have to store messages locally (is that my legal department cheering in the background?), nor do I have to try and search them using my desktop search tool

While Manjoo's article raises many great points on better managing email and edging toward an empty inbox (a.k.a. sweet nirvana for us Type-As), there's one thing I've got to clarify. He recommends creating an Archive folder in your inbox (great idea!). For messages requiring no action or response from the recipient, users can quickly scan them and "then shoot them into your archive and forget them." Agreed. It's nice to quickly get messages out of your inbox and forget about them ... until you hit your quota and are forced to delete your archived messages. Unfortunately, that discarded email has now become the golden ticket in your quest to land a big deal, and it's gone forever.

But with Mail Archive, I've still got my golden ticket and an empty inbox, too. Can it get any better?

"Freemium" as a way to try SaaS

Nick Mehta — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:57:00 GMT

Phil Wainewright from ZDNet has, hands-down, the best blog on software-as-a-service (SaaS) out there.

As usual, he has a new and very insightful post today - this time on "freemium" business models.

Freemium, for those of you that don't know, is the idea that was first popularized in consumer services, where you allow a customer to use a free service and then enable them to upgrade to a paid service:

At the heart of a ‘freemium' business model is a notion that makes me viscerally uncomfortable: giving something away for nothing. Services are given away free in the expectation of being able to sell paid-for, premium services to a subset of customers later on. In essence, the free subscriptions are a marketing cost that is recouped once the premium services start to take off. Fair enough, but in the heady atmosphere of recent years, some people have driven this model to extremes. Twitter and Facebook are examples of what I would call the ‘lunatic fringe' of the freemium business model: enterprises that give away services without any preconception of how they'll eventually recoup the cost of acquiring and servicing those free subscriptions. From a business perspective, this surely is unadulterated folly.

Phil then goes to highlight several companies offering free business services as lead-ins to a paid service. Box.net is a personal favorite. I know the company well and am an avid user of the service.

We actually launched our own freemium offering last fall with LiveOffice Mail Continuity. In this service, we offer a completely free email disaster recovery service that allows users to view, send and receive email directly from Microsoft Outlook in the event that their internal Microsoft Exchange server is unavailable.

As I discussed previously, we launched this free service for two reasons:

We think this is a great way for customers to pilot email "in the cloud" with minimal impact on their production email system. Indeed, we offer a free trial to test the free service.
Once a customer is setup for this service (which involves a simple configuration change in Microsoft Exchange and provides an integrated folder in Microsoft Outlook), there is literally no additional setup to move the customer to our paid email archiving service. So the customer simply has to sign a contract and agree to pay us, and we then retain the data based upon the customer's retention periods.

So for us, our freemium allows us to help potential clients, let them learn about us and give them an easy path to move to our paid service.

Microsoft Azure: Cloud computing for the rest of us

Nick Mehta — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:31:00 GMT

Microsoft announced a high-level schedule for delivery of its Azure cloud computing offering today:

More details on Azure, including pricing, should be available in the "coming weeks and months," Steven Martin, senior director of product management for Microsoft's developer platform, said in an interview. It's unclear when exactly pricing details are coming, but Microsoft plans to unveil new features of Azure later this month at its MIX Web developer conference.

While the announcement was filled with ambiguous "plans to" and "coming weeks and months," and (my favorite) "expected to," the impact of what they're working on can't be underestimated.

One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it simplifies the infrastructure management problem that has plagued everyone in IT for so many years. Yet cloud computing, until now, has largely been optimized for the open source (e.g., Linux) application stack. For example, Amazon's EC2 web service is great for Linux but is, in our opinion, still pretty raw for Windows.

Yet, speaking from experience, the infrastructure management problem that cloud computing purports to solve is perhaps the most severe in the Microsoft Windows environment. Anyone that has had to reboot servers every few days knows what I'm talking about.

Hence, we're excited to see Azure when it's "expected to" be released.

An Open Letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

Amy Dugdale — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:05:00 GMT

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger & Other United States Governors:

It's no secret, times are tough. In light of the current economy, you have to make do with far fewer resources than ever before. At the same time, you still need technologies in place to keep your states running smoothly and in compliance with the multitude of current laws and regulations (FRCP, California Public Records Act, Sunshine Laws). With the ever-growing volumes of email and the critical importance of maintaining it as a government record, your technology departments are struggling with how to keep email systems operating without the funding they need.

We have a solution for you - SaaS email management. With this model, your technology teams can outsource all email-related tasks to an expert vendor, and you only pay for what you need on a monthly basis. The flexibility of SaaS during tough economic times means your technology teams can:

Add and remove users as needed, without paying for unused accounts or waiting to scale your infrastructure
Maintain full control of email, while shifting the burden and expense of high network uptime and reliability to an enterprise-class vendor
Get up and running with fully hosted email and legally compliant archiving in just a matter of days (not months) without disrupting end users

In response to these difficult economic times, we are introducing the LiveOffice Economic Recovery Plan. This program is designed to provide state and local governments as well as educational institutions with an effective solution for managing email systems, while also ensuring that all retention and compliance requirements are seamlessly met. And, to those public sector and non-profit organizations facing uncertainty about your government funding, financing and budgets for this year, we also invite you to signup. The LiveOffice Economic Recovery Plan allows you to take advantage of our SaaS-based email archiving and hosting solutions with no monthly payments until June 1, 2009.*

For more information on this program, please contact one of our Economic Recovery Plan Experts at 800.374.2032.

Respectfully,

Nick Mehta

CEO, LiveOffice

SaaS gets you away from finger-pointing

Nick Mehta — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:59:00 GMT

Technology is definitely never easy and any vendor that tells you otherwise probably has a Brooklyn Bridge to sell you too.

However, one of the big challenges for many IT departments is figuring out which part of their technology stack is to blame for any given issue. Many customers find hosted email archiving solutions to be attractive because they get "one throat to choke."

Case in point: Check out the recent data loss issues related to the email archiving solution involving EMC Centera hardware and Symantec Enterprise Vault software:

Yet despite EMC's denials and their customers' hesitations to go public with their archiving problems, evidence emergedwhich raised questions about the integrity of EMC's commitment to the integrity of their customers' archives.

...

In short - when Symantec publicly declares that EMC Centera (and only EMC Centera) is vulnerable to data loss, the entire industry - and most importantly archiving customers need to stand up and listen.

Obviously the main point of the article (from EMC arch-rival NetApp) is to blast EMC for the data loss issue.

But the underlying theme is also interesting. Is it the hardware? Is it the software? As a customer, you just want it to work, so getting stuck in the middle of a vendor blame game isn't helpful.

On-premise email archive indexing nightmares

Nick Mehta — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:32:00 GMT

One of the top reasons for which organizations deploy email archiving solutions is to allow them to find important email when they need it - whether for email discovery, email compliance or simply knowledge management.

Unfortunately, as the billions of dollars in CapEx that Google spends on its search infrastructure proves, searching (and indexing - the process to make searching possible) is easier said than done.

Many customers that try to deploy their own archives often find that the indexes become corrupt (unusable), slow or worse, inconsistent.

For example, witness this thread on a Google Groups forum about Autonomy's Zantaz EAS product:

We have a similar problem. We have been struggling for 8 months to build an idol index. We start building the index from scratch and everything runs at a reasonable pace initially and the idx files are processed. As the index grows the speed at which it processes the idx files slows down considerably, eventually it almost grinds to a halt.

Our vendor has tried various configurations for us over the last 9 months and we have still not succeeded in building a complete index. We have about 21 million docs to index and the best we get too is about 5 million docs indexed.

Quite honestly this product is not doing more for us other than reduce the size of our mailfiles. Even on the archiving side we continually experience cases where users are unable to retrieve archived mails. I could spend time on webbex's with our vendor trying to sort each of these issues out, but there are so many and my perception is that the support from autonomy is
so poor that I do not waste my time anymore, I just restore from tape.

This isn't an issue with Autonomy per-se. You'll find similar issues for nearly all on-premise products. The fact is that indexing technology is notoriously-complex:

You need to make sure that indices have consistent access to high-speed storage.
You need to make sure that index servers have appropriate RAM and RAM configuration.
You need to continually scale and add indexing nodes to scale with unpredictable search volume. Troubleshooting performance is really challenging.
Even if you have it down to science, you need to figure out how to handle the once-a-year HUGE search without always over-provisioning the system and wasting capacity the rest of the year.
You need to diagnose missing or inconsistent results if you find them (and you will).
You need to make sure you have full-time staff who can handle all of the issues above.

In the end, many customers are left like the one above - using the on-premise email archive for mailbox management but not getting the E-Discovery benefits that they originally bought the product for.

Backing Up vs. Archiving: What’s the Diff?

Dean Nicolls — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:16:00 GMT

We get this question a lot from IT folks who have faithfully backing up their email for years. First off, we are not suggesting you stop backing-up. Far from it.

Backing up your company data is important from a disaster recovery perspective. A nice short-term insurance policy. Meaning that should your primary messaging environment (e.g., Exchange) collapse or fall victim to some type of natural or manmade disaster, you will have a copy of it stored safely offsite.

That's obviously a good thang.

The trouble is some IT folks mistakenly believe that their back-up can also meet their email compliance or legal discovery needs. But, think about it. Let's say your company gets sued and the opposing council asks for an email thread involving Amy, your wayward manager prone to fits of rage, and her ex-employee, John, whom she summarily fired three years ago.

If you relied on back-up tapes, you would have to do the following:

Search for the old tapes (assuming you hadn't overwritten them)
Hope that you could restore the tape (assuming it wasn't corrupted after three years sitting in storage)
Try to find the relevant emails related to the case

Since people backup email servers every day, week and month, you don't end up having to restore one tape but often many. For example, if you backup every day and want all email for a year, it could be 365 tapes. And once you have all those tapes, you have to de-duplicate because you'll have tons of redundant data. So, the process of restoring could literally take you weeks if not months

Another pitfall of backup is that you don't end up capturing ALL emails (e.g., data that was created and deleted in same day) because backups often happen just once a day and tapes often miss data sitting in people's laptops (e.g., PST files).

And there's a better than average chance that after all of this, you still won't be able to find the needle in the haystack. This could cost you big time if the jury thinks you're trying to squash damaging evidence.

Now, let's compare that with an email archiving solution. What's the difference?

First off, when you archive every email they get indexed and stored in the archive in real-time. Because they have been indexed, it's easy to find an email based on the sender, the date range, subject line or even keywords in the email body or attachment with just a few clicks. And perhaps, in the process, you may find that Amy actually had legal grounds to terminate John.

But, there are a few other benefits of archiving that you get as a bonus.

One. By having an email archive, you can reduce the size of your email storage since you can now safely "prune" these stores knowing that they have been securely archived. Plus, you can now safely reduce the mailbox sizes allocated to your end users.

Two. By pruning your email stores, you can significantly shorten your backup windows (the time it takes to back up all of your email).

And three. With many archiving solutions, you can even give your end users direct access to their own historical email. Translation - they can restore their own email in seconds without having to involve YOU! And in so doing, you can eliminate PSTs (personal email folders typically stored on their desktops) which can be missed during legal discovery and are prone to accidental loss.

Consequently, email archiving allows Exchange administrators to get a handle on some of their most common pains, including exploding email volumes and the daily challenges of backups. We encourage you to learn more about these differences in our Archiving vs. Backing Up white paper.

As the White House Email Debacle Turns…

Amy Dugdale — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:00:00 GMT

For the first time, there is more to the president's departure than the traditional, last-minute pardons - the transfer of emails to the National Archives.

As the Washington Post reports in a January 15^th article:

A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge yesterday that the Bush administration will meet its legal requirement to transfer e-mails to the National Archives after spending more than $10 million to locate 14 million e-mails reported missing four years ago from White House computer files.

I'll admit that I've already been sipping the Inaugural Punch. But even in my semi-euphoric state, an estimated price tag of $10 million to locate 14 million emails hurts. Ouch.

In addition, the article goes on to talk about how:

U.S. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered employees of the president's executive office -- with just days to go before their departure -- to undertake a comprehensive search of computer workstations, preserve portable hard drives and examine any e-mail archives created or retained from 2003 to 2005, the period in which e-mails appeared to be missing.

This order is in addition to the private contractors hired to search through "an estimated 60,000 tapes that contain daily recordings of the entire contents of the White House computers as a precaution against an electronic disaster."

Nick has already done a great job of talking about how implementing a central email archive with search functionality can make life with corporate email much easier. So, I won't get into that this time.

What I do want to say is that the technology available for preserving and searching emails is significantly better than many of these articles are making it sound. I've got to advocate for the fact that many of today's email archiving solutions are up to snuff for jobs like this, even in the White House. It's the human error factor that can't be accounted for, which is why it makes even more sense to outsource to a third party with specific expertise in email archiving.

LiveOffice Q4 rocked!

Nick Mehta — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:34:00 GMT

In a time where good news is hard to find, we were blessed to see our business grow dramatically in the fourth quarter of 2008. As we announced, we had our best quarter by far in our company's history while growing sales 148% year-over-year versus Q4 of 2007.

How is this possible in a down economy? We're still trying to pinch ourselves to see if we're dreaming. And we know that 2009 could still be challenging. However, a few points are becoming clear:

Email archiving continues to grow in market demand despite the downturn, and in some cases because of it. The SEC reported that firms cannot cut email compliance projects, despite the economy. And the recession is creating a new waive of litigation and e-discovery.
SaaS (software-as-a-service) is really taking off. As InternetNews points out:

"Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one of the technologies the company picked. Many businesses are turning to the category of product to cut costs, avoid the expenses of installing and maintaining on-site software..."

Put two and two together and hosted email archivingis red hot. Customers want the benefits of archiving, but don't want to add yet another task to their IT staff while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, servers and storage. As Brian Babineau from Enterprise Strategy Group says:

"Today the decision isn't whether or not to archive email, but instead how best to implement a solution. In light of the current economy, an increasing number of companies are turning to SaaS solutions to help them reduce upfront capital expenditures on in-house hardware and software deployments, while also lessening the system management burden placed on overworked IT resources."

To delete or not delete, that is the question

Nick Mehta — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:38:00 GMT

If I had a dollar for every IT customer that says they are "waiting for legal to define their retention policies" before they implement their email archive, I'd be a rich man.

David Ferris on his Ferris Research blog has a great post on customers' decisions email retention schedules.

His key takeaways:

* For a small proportion of emails, retention schedules are applied. This is usually because the user has dragged the document into a folder with an associated retention policy.
* Defining retention policy is usually left to users. It's too labor-intensive to do this, so it's usually not done. When users do define a retention policy, they often do so incorrectly.
* A diminishing proportion of organizations delete information after some period, perhaps 30 or 60 days.
* An increasing proportion of organizations today make no systematic attempts to delete emails at all.

It's pretty interesting how customer thinking around retention has evolved during my 5-year career in email archiving.

I have seen the following many times at clients:
* "We want to delete everything after 90 days."
* "Except for my mailbox... I need to keep that longer. :)"
* "Actually we want to have users categorize stuff manually and only keep business-relevant stuff more than 90 days."
* "Actually can we have some technology to automatically figure out what's important because our users will revolt if we ask them to do something more in their email?"
* "That technology doesn't exist huh?"
* "For now, we're going to keep data for 3 years until we define a better policy."
* "Actually, since the 3 years are up and we're not sure about deleting, let's just keep data indefinitely for now."

It's no one's fault but simply points to the complexity of matching business and legacy policy to the huge, unstructured and informal volume of email communication we have today.

No matter what, however, if you have the data, it's better to have it in one place where you can easily and cost-effectively search it for email discovery and other purposes.

Merge FINRA and SEC Oversight?

Amy Dugdale — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:22:00 GMT

According to a recent Securities Industry News article, research firm TowerGroup believes "The Securities and Exchange Commissions' investment adviser regulatory functions should be rolled into the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)."

Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup believes a merger would address what some see as the SEC's failure to adequately police investment advisers by leveraging FINRA's resources, principally in the examination area. "From our perspective, the teeth to do this already exist at FINRA if they are allowed to use them," said senior research director Matthew Bienfang. "The SEC also has the teeth; they just don't have the resources."

But the part of the article that really caught my eye was where the author mentions that "...financially strapped advisory firms [are coming] under growing pressure to cut compliance costs, even as arbitration claims soar."

Working at a company that has helped thousands of registered investment advisors through regulatory audits over the last several years, I can tell you that many of them feel that in light of their limited compliance budgets they are over-regulated. They are small businesses that are expected to have compliance controls in place much like their enterprise-size brethren, which is exactly where SaaS comes in.

When email landed on the compliance radar in the early 2000s, smaller financial services companies quickly started picking up our SaaS email archiving and compliance solution - they realized almost immediately that they could get enterprise-class technology in a reasonable, pay-as-you-go monthly subscription service. Thousands of these companies are now clients of ours and I applaud them for proactively finding a solution that worked for them, both from a budget and compliance standpoint.

So while I won't ring in on whether the SEC and FINRA should merge their oversight branches (I'll leave that to the experts), I will mention that President-elect Obama has appointed FINRA CEO Mary Schapiro to head the SEC. This appointment hints to coming changes at the SEC that may mirror how FINRA currently operates in terms of oversight. With heightened regulatory scrutiny (resulting directly from the recent scandals and economic decline) and big changes coming at the SEC, these are uncertain times for many in the industry, but one thing will remain - our commitment to providing financial services professionals with effective and affordable SaaS tools for managing their email compliance.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and migrations

Nick Mehta — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:09:00 GMT

TheRegister reportedthat EMC is shutting down its main (Belgium) development center for its archive storage offering, the EMC Centera.

While EMC denies that this means the end of life for EMC Centera, it's certainly made a number of EMC archive customers nervous:

Taken together, these executive moves and the closing of the Mechelen Centera development center suggest that the Centera product could be approaching its end of life.

So what does a customer do when their archive storage is EOLed? They are forced to find a new storage vendor and migrate all of that data (often terabytes worth) to the new platform. For cash and time-strapped IT departments, this can means hundreds of thousands of dollars of unplanned cost and hundreds of hours of unplanned time.

And the fact is that since most customer keep archive data 3, 5, 7 years or more, they will eventually be forced to migrate their data - whether because a vendor EOLs its products or because they need to upgrade to newer storage.

I think this is one of the significant yet subtle benefits of software-as-a-service for email archiving. Clients can be rest assured that their data is always available at a predictable monthly cost without worrying about moving it around constantly.

So EMC Centera customers, we're glad to bail out your Centera with our TARP program.

Economic recession, SaaS boom?

Nick Mehta — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:32:00 GMT

I've written previouslyabout the fact that this current economic downturn could spark increased interest in software-as-a-service. In addition, my colleague Amy Dugdale came up with the catchy phrase that Less Cash = More SaaS. In this vein, two articles caught my attention.

Computerworld recently asked "are SaaS & recession killing perpetual software licenses?"

Meanwhile, Gartner recently released a study that SaaS is going to grow in 90% of organizations:

Mertz added that the current global recession, which will force firms to cut discretionary spending in 2009 and 2010, would see budgets redirected from enhancing on-premises solutions towards SaaS solutions.

Despite the increase use of SaaS, most respondents to Gartner's survey said no governance policies had been developed. Only 38 percent of total respondents that are currently using SaaS have a process or policy that guides the evaluation, procurement and deployment of SaaS. The majority of these organizations are based in Europe and North America. Another 26 percent had no plans at all to address this issue.

We're certainly seeing an increased interest in software-as-a-service for email archiving and Exchange hosting over the past few months.

LiveOffice named one of the fastest-growing companies in Los Angeles

Nick Mehta — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:25:00 GMT

We're proud to announce that we earned a spot on the Los Angeles Business Journal's list of 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies. Again, just like the Deloitte award, the credit for this goes to our clients who have put their faith and trust in us and our email archiving offerings.

SEC says don't pinch pennies on your email compliance

Nick Mehta — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:15:00 GMT

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission sent an open letter to CEOs of SEC-registered firms imploring them to not ignore or curtail their compliance responsibilities because of the economic downturn.

While CEOs across the world are trying to find ways to save money, they still need to observe their legal and regulatory responsibilities. Obviously, proper email archiving and email compliance are some of the SEC mandates for these firms.

From the letter:

While many firms are considering reductions and cost-cutting measures, we remind you of your firm's legal obligation to maintain an adequate compliance program reasonably designed to achieve compliance with the law. As SEC Chairman Cox noted recently, "[E]xperience has taught us again and again that giving short shrift to regulatory compliance subjects a company's investors, employees, management, directors, and every other stakeholder to unacceptable risks....[C]ompliance programs have made huge strides in recent years in becoming more formalized and more robust.... Now more than ever, companies need to take a long-term view on compliance and realize that their fiduciary responsibility requires a constant commitment to investors. That means sustaining their support for compliance during this market turmoil, and beyond it as well."

The "cloud's" silver lining

Nick Mehta — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:10:00 GMT

It's pretty tough out there, no matter where "there" is. We all hope that things will get better soon in our world economy.

But one of the subtle points about this recession is that companies and government organizations are scrubbing their budgets to see how they can "do more with less." Many cash- and resource-strapped organizations are turning toward software-as-a-service (or "cloud computing")-based approaches to help during this economic downturn.

Analyst David Ferris points this out in his blog entry today:

Struggling economies bring challenges, but also opportunities.

The IT world is ripe for a major shift, for three reasons:

* Economic concerns are driving IT departments to aggressively increase efficiency and reduce cost.
* Vendors have built vast SaaS infrastructures to enable outsourced messaging, collaboration, applications, and compliance solutions at a fixed cost (examples: Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, Iron Mountain, LiveOffice).
* Server virtualization technologies - from Microsoft, Sun, VMWare, and in Linux distributions - have matured to the point where highly available, high-volume, and complex applications can be efficiently virtualized, at a savings of cost, space, administrative overhead, and energy consumption.

The state of the economy will have a catalytic effect on customer adoption of and migration to SaaS and virtual environments over the coming two years. Within the next three to five years, hosters will start using a combination of multitenancy and virtualization, to offer an always-on, always-available set of solutions to customers over the Internet.

Thus the state of the economy will greatly encourage customers to migrate to SaaS/cloud and virtual environments.

My colleague Amy Dugdale in our marketing team mentioned this out in a catchy way recently by saying Less Cash = More SaaS.

In addition, we previously discussed that email archiving demand will grow in the coming years as we all demand more transparency into what's happening in the business and government world.

Finally, we recently announced our Troubled Archive Relief Program(TARP) to help customers move from an on-premise archiving system today to LiveOffice's hosted email archive.

Often times of economic change catalyze shifts in technology and I think we're going through a major shift as we speak.

An Open Letter to President-elect Barack Obama

Amy Dugdale — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:42:00 GMT

Dear President-elect Obama:

As the New York Times reported recently, you've got a problem-your email. Experts (and according to the story, even your advisors) say that the Presidential Records Act makes it too risky for you to keep emailing and using your trusty BlackBerry once you take office. But you built your campaign platform around the idea of change, and we say it's time to buck the trend and turn you into an emailing, BlackBerry'ing commander-in-chief. We're confident it can be done.

"How?" you ask. What you need is an email archiving system that securely captures all the messages you send and receive and preserves them in their original format. It can even handle email messages you send from your BlackBerry. Plus, if you opt for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, you can be up and running in just a few days (and you'll never even notice a difference in your email).

As the first emailing president, an email archiving solution can help you:

Increase the transparency of your administration (which you've said is a top priority)
Prevent the risk of lost messages (and the subsequent bad PR - as we saw when the Bush administration lost "potentially millions" of messages)
Benefit from the efficiencies of email while protecting your messages in a highly secure environment

As the developer of one of the first cloud-based email archiving solutions, we can tell you from firsthand experience that being the first to do something is always buzz worthy-and a solid email archiving system can make you the first emailing president. That's our platform, and we're sticking to it.

Respectfully,

Your Friends at LiveOffice

Mark Cuban case shows importance of saving email

Nick Mehta — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:34:00 GMT

As you may know, Mark Cuban, billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is currently being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for insider trading.

While the matter of the case itself is very serious, the sideshow between Mr. Cuban and SEC trial attorney Jeffrey Norris is shocking.

As reported, Mr. Norris, who is not involved in the investigation, is under review for sending inappropriate email to Mark Cuban.

The email trailis entertaining and frightening to read. At one point, Mr. Norris points out, in criticism of Mr. Cuban's sponsorship of the controversial anti-war movie Loose Change:

"Either you are really an anti-American ideologue or your allegiance to making money is significantly greater than your dedication to your country," Norris told Cuban.

In this case, Mr. Cuban's attorneys are using this email trail to show that he was unfairly targeted by the SEC. Having an email archive can come in very handy, no matter who you are.

Good article on downside to Google Apps

Nick Mehta — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:06:00 GMT

As I've writtenabout, I think the Microsoft Office/Outlook/Exchange platform will be widely used for years to come. Microsoft "gets" enterprise technology in a way that Google still does not to this day.

CNNMoney.com has a great articleabout some of the issues small businesses will face when trying to switch from Microsoft Office/Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps. It's worth a read.

The closing line is probably the most accurate:

Google is good, but it's not perfect. And if you're not very careful, it can really hurt you.

Beyond the buzzword: Helping IT avoid the e-Discovery hot potato

Nick Mehta — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Spurzem at Ferris Research has a good post on their blog about how IT departments should try to remove themselves from the day-to-day e-Discovery process by implementing an email archiving solution. Realistically, there is nothing good that comes from being involved in a lawsuit, so IT folks are eager to hand off the responsibilities to legal if they can.

As Spurzem states:

It's much better if searches can be performed by users--the human resources (HR) department, legal, or compliance officers--rather than email administrators, because:

People who perform the email search have certain legal responsibilities. Depending on the nature of the investigation, they may be required to provide testimony in court or in a deposition, regarding the exact nature of the search they performed.

Users who understand the purpose of searches and the context of the matter are better equipped to conduct searches.

Email administrators should maintain control over the email archiving solution. They can assist in preparation of the data and in the packaging of the search results, but they should not be involved in the actual search and the analysis of the search results.

Software-as-a-service email archiving solutions can help deliver on this promise of removing IT from the E-Discovery process. Why?

It's hard to predict the demand for searches in an archival system. During normal times, you may have infrequent searches but during a litigation event, you may get tons of searches that are time-sensitive.

Many customers of on-premise email archiving products start with the vision that they'll turn the search interface over to legal and "let them have at it." Unfortunately, IT often finds itself having to manage searches to make sure the searches aren't overwhelming the system at any given point. For example, if there is a big discovery matter, they need to make sure other searches aren't slowing that important search down. So typically IT ends up running the searches themselves and are "stuck in the middle" (to quote the Stealers Wheels song) of the e-Discovery process.

In contrast, because of our cloud-based infrastructure, we scale up and down to meet client search needs without any effort for the customer. IT can give their legal team the LiveOffice Mail Archive interface for searching with confidence, knowing that searches will continue to be fast.

In addition, some of the legacy on-premise products have search interfaces that are designed for high-end customers and are thus very complex. So it's tough to put the offerings in front of legal departments - they just don't get how to use the product. Again, IT is left to babysit the searches.

Get IT out of the e-Discovery business. It's good for your company, good for your legal team and good for your sanity.

Congratulations to John Thompson, Enrique Salem

Nick Mehta — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:33:00 GMT

Congratulations to John Thompson, who is retiring from his CEO role at my former employer, Symantec, after nine great years. John is an amazing leader and has truly transformed the company in his tenure.

In addition, Symantec is lucky that it had an amazing chief in the wings with Enrique Salem, former COO and new CEO.

Congratulations to both!

LiveOffice named to Deloitte Technology Fast 500

Nick Mehta — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:19:00 GMT

This is a quick one, but we are proud to say that LiveOffice was named to Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 list, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in North America.

We're proud of this achievement. The credit goes to our thousands of customers that have partnered with us and helped us grow over the years. Thank you.

TARP: A bailout plan for failed on-premise email archives

Nick Mehta — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:31:00 GMT

The holidays are coming up and it's a time for giving. Lord knows that the world needs some giving these days.

Our government is taking the lead this season with the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the artist formerly known as the "bailout plan."

And as the Feds rescue Wall Street, Main Street, bridges to nowhere and Joe the Plumber, we want do our part.

All right, I'll stop kidding around. We just thought TARP was a convenient acronym that could describe what we're up to at LiveOffice.

As I've told friends countless times, on-premise email archives are great and have tons of functionality. Software offerings like Symantec Enterprise Vault successfully power email archives for many large organizations across the world.

Unfortunately not every customer realizes the effort (in terms of time, trouble and Total Cost of Ownership) involved in successfully deploying and managing on-premise email archives. For the large customers with the budget and IT staff to handle them, in-house solutions are an excellent fit.

On the other hand, I've spoken with countless customers of on-premise email archiving vendors who didn't realize what they got themselves into and ended up with one of the following:

Shelfware - an undeployed archive (often because they couldn't muster the budget or resources to get the hardware and adjacent technology setup to power the archive).
"Mal"ware - an archive that just can't stay up and running.
Nowhere - hundreds of thousands of dollars spent with the same growing email stores, PST/NSF proliferation and manual e-Discovery searches as before.

To reiterate, I firmly believe that these failed deployments are not because the software products are bad. Indeed, I think the products from leading vendors get better each year. The fact is, however, that a software vendor can only control a part of the customer's environment and many customers are just not equipped to deploy and manage an email archive themselves.

We at LiveOffice believe that SaaS is a great way for organizations with limited IT staff, budget or both to rapidly obtain the benefits of email archiving.

In particular, we believe that customers who tried an on-premise email archive and haven't been able to make it work could benefit from SaaS in a big way.

With that, we're announcing our Troubled Archive Relief Program (TARP), a six-step initiative to help customers with on-premise email archiving deployments that didn't work out migrate to the "cloud." The key pieces to this program are:

A Total Cost of Ownership calculatorto show customers how much they can save moving to a SaaS email archiving solution.
A third-party endorsement of this calculator by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, so you know this wasn't just a vendor making this stuff up. :)
A white paper(written by yours truly :) ) on the various management tasks you take on with an on-premise email archive that you don't have to deal with in the SaaS world.
A free trialoffer to test out SaaS archiving. This is pretty neat in that if you have an on-premise archive, you can try our solution out side-by-side and the setup takes literally just a few minutes (configure email journaling to send a copy of your email to our secure data centers).
An offer to come visit you and address how the migration would work. We have a strong staff of professionals with experience in both the SaaS and on-premise email archiving worlds.
Data migration services to help you export data quickly and securely out of your existing archive and migrate it to us, in conjunction with archive migration specialist Procedo.

Hopefully the LiveOffice TARP can get email archiving customers back on the path to recovery.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and integration

Nick Mehta — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:03:00 GMT

This is a quick one. Ray Wang has a good poston his blog about how customers need to think about integration between their SaaS applications.

As we sit here on the first day of salesforce.com's annual conference and read their new announcementsaround their force.com platform, I think the industry is realizing that the power of SaaS or "clouds" is when they are integrated together.

I personally think that SaaS will make business applications 10X more powerful through this linkage. Traditionally, to link applications (e.g., your CRM with your financial application), you needed to go through your IT department which had its own list of backlogged projects. Because of this, most applications lived in their own silos, leading to lost visibility and disconnected business processes.

Now business users can leverage existing pre-built connectors between popular SaaS apps and stitch them together to meet their requirements.

Less Cash = More SaaS?

Amy Dugdale — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:14:00 GMT

For those of you who know Nick, you realize that he likes to mix things up and keep life interesting (actually, he'd probably say "awesome," instead of interesting). In this vein, he has invited some of his fellow LiveOffice'rs, me included, to guest blog from time to time. My posts will focus more on the business value and economics of SaaS - and occasionally touch upon the media's coverage of SaaS and cloud computing. So here goes Post #1...

Less Cash = More SaaS?

The other morning I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym with the Bloomberg ticker flying across the TV screen in front of me (does anyone besides me think the art of "getting away" is lost even at the gym these days?!). Still sleepy-eyed and operating without my morning caffeine, all I could see was a single red streak of ticker symbols and red downward-pointing arrows. It was clear that this was going to be "another one of those days" - days that have become too much of the norm recently. Working in the SaaS industry, I started thinking about how we may be affected and so I asked myself ...

"Will the economy's demise lead to SaaS's rise?"

Having been in the SaaS business for the last six years, I realize this isn't the first time SaaS is being hailed as the little train that can, while the rest of the technology sector slows (just look at all the software and hardware stalwarts jumping on the SaaS bandwagon - they apparently got the memo from their accountants re: the recurring revenue model). But I also believe things are different for SaaS companies this time around and that this is in fact may be our promotion to the big leagues. The model is more mature, which provides us with a better chance than ever before to make a fair and accurate assessment of SaaS's viability during ...gulp ...a possible recession (or at the very least, a downturn).

What's different about SaaS this time around? The model, and its applicability outside of CRM, is finally gaining credibility within the enterprise and among industry visionaries and pundits alike. Even the national business press is on the SaaS train.

Consider the following:

Widespread adoption of SaaS by SMBs and growing interest within the enterprise market
Rising media attention for SaaS and cloud computing - especially in the enterprise IT trades (the toughest audience of all!)
Recognition from widely-respected industry analysts that SaaS is here to stay (and not just for SMBs)

Plus, SaaS's predictable pricing model is increasingly attractive to cash-strapped companies, who by moving to a service are able to transform their capital expenditures on technology equipment into more balance sheet-friendly operating expenses.

What do you think? Will less cash mean more SaaS?

Who to blame for the collapse? Check your email

Nick Mehta — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:21:00 GMT

I know we have become somewhat desensitized to the daily triple-digit losses in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But in case you have been asleep the past year, it's been pretty bad out there, no matter where "there" is.

As humans, it's natural for us to go through the various stages of grief:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

I think the first "D" (Denial) was pretty much the last ten years.

We are squarely in "A" (Anger) right now, as far as I can tell from hearing our government officials talk, though I'm guessing the Fed and Treasury Department have fast-forwarded ahead into "B" (Bargaining) with our $700 billion.

The next "D" is the word-that-shall-not-be-spoken right now.

And I'm hoping the second "A" (Acceptance) comes soon!

But we've seen the "Anger" phase before many times. Who's responsible, the public cries? Bring them before us! Let's see the evidence. Pitchforks and torches optional.

From my experience, there is only one truth to these situations. The truth is in our email. Remember the Internet bubble? Frank Quattrone (famous investment banker)'s email to his troops ordering them to "clean up" their data after being informed of a federal inquiry? Henry Blodgett (famous research analyst)'s emails that contradicted the positive ratings he was giving to technology stocks? The crazy messages sent by the Enron folks?

After that crash, a wave of email regulations by the SEC and NASD (now FINRA) forced many individuals involved in the securities business to have their email and other communications archived and reviewed. Indeed, billions of those email and IM messages are captured using our own LiveOffice AdvisorMail. But those rules were confined to the securities industry.

What did this crash teach us? Besides us all learning the intricacies of CMOs, CDOs and CDSs, the world has realized that no market is isolated anymore. Wall Street and Main Street are interconnected, whether they know it or not. From Illinois to Iceland, from ARMs to automobiles, we are all tied together financially. Hence, to find the truth, we will need to look at email and records across industries and across the world.

Case in point: bond rating agencies. These companies were the watchdogs that were supposed to measure and publicize the risk of various debt instruments. These firms were the ones that told us that sub-prime mortgages were low-risk. Ouch.

Recently, email messages from these firms were publicized:

``Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,'' one e-mail from an S&P employee said.

And more:

In the September 2007 e-mail made public today, the Moody's employee said that it ``seems to me that we had blinders on and never questioned the information we were given,'' according to the congressional investigators. ``It is our job to think of the worst-case scenarios and model them.''

The e-mail continued: ``Combined, these errors make us look either incompetent at credit analysis, or like we sold our soul to the devil for revenue.''

Seriously?

Or check out this instant message trail related to debt rating to make you even more Angry.

It's interesting because having an email archive helps all sides in these scenarios:

Less cost for the companies involved. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, these bond rating companies, like all companies under investigation, would be obligated to produce whatever they have that's reasonably-accessible regardless as to cost or effort. At least they didn't have to go back to backup tapes to get these messages and spend millions of dollars doing it.
More visibility for the public. Obviously this information will help us untangle and get to the core of how we got here. And getting it quickly means we find the truth faster.

I don't know how all of this will shake out for our economy. I pray and hope like the rest of us. But I do know that when bad things occur, it's good to have evidence around to at least understand what happened and learn from it.

Google isn't "feeling lucky" about uptime

Nick Mehta — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:12:00 GMT

Let me start by saying that I am a huge admirer of Google. They clearly drive much of the thought leadership and innovation in the Internet.

However, even Google can make mistakes and I think they are learning some of the unique challenges of running paid technology for businesses versus free technology for consumers.

Last week, several websites reported significant downtime on Google Apps Premier Edition (gmail's business, paid version):

For the second time in recent months Gmail has suffered a significant outage that left an unknown, but clearly upset, number of users without e-mail. This time the outage appears to have affected primarily Google Apps Premier Edition Gmail users.

Apparently "some users were left without e-mail for over a day" which couldn't have been fun.

And other reports indicate the issues continued into this week:

Google's web-based e-mail service continues to suffer a few hiccups and outages Monday. The service has been spotty ever since a significant outage last week left an untold number of customers without access to e-mail and other Google web services like Calendar and Docs.

I know Google is a great organization and that they'll learn from this. Most of all, I'm sure they are learning how different business email truly is from consumer email.

A bailout plan for your Exchange server: Free email continuity

Nick Mehta — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:26:00 GMT

Quick quiz. What goes up and down in wild swings, often with no explanation? If you answered the stock market, you're right. But if you guessed that your internal Exchange server is also prone to volatility, you are correct there as well.

In this spirit, we are announcing LiveOffice Mail Continuity, a completely free "bailout plan" for your internal mail server.

Why Mail Continuity

When we talk to our clients running internal Exchange servers (many of them looking to go to Hosted Exchange 2007), we always ask them what their big pain points are for their Exchange environment. Obviously email archiving, email compliance and e-Discovery are high on their radar. But for some customers, simply keeping the email environment up and running is a challenge.

To the end, we recently partnered with Osterman Research, a respected analyst in the email world, to conduct a survey to IT managers on their email needs. The findings reveal that 50 percent of respondents do not currently have an email continuity solution in place. Of those who say they do, nearly half are relying on tape backups.

Why is this, you may ask? Everyone knows that email is mission critical, right? The sad fact is that for most IT departments, there aren't many good alternatives. They could implement clustering and replication solutions for Exchange, but these are often out of the reach of most IT departments in terms of cost and complexity.

And why are backups not sufficient? If you've ever been through an email restore, you know the answers:

Recovery from backup tapes can take hours, days or weeks.
During downtime, users have no email service.
Without business email service, users often resort to using personal email accounts during outages, exposing organizations to security risks, compliance violations and legal liability.
All data is not recoverable-anything created after the last backup is permanently lost. For example, if backups happen daily, all data between the last day's backup and the outage is unrecoverable.

How Does It Work?

Customers can sign up for free email continuity today. Once you sign up, one of our messaging experts will contact you to get you setup. You should be up in running a matter of a few days or less. You only have to make two changes to your environment:

Change your DNS "MX" record (the record in DNS that routes your email) to route through LiveOffice's secure, rock-solid data centers. This allows you to use LiveOffice for email if your internal mail servers are down.
Configure your Exchange server to "journal" (send a copy in the background of) all email to our data centers.

Once you're setup, you have peace of mind, knowing that if your mail server were to fail, your employees can continue with secure, compliant business email during the downtime.

Specifically, if your internal mail server goes down, you simply call us or login to the LiveOffice Mail Continuity administration console to "flip the switch" and have your employees start using LiveOffice for their email temporarily.

The best thing about it is that employees can continue to use their existing Microsoft Outlook email client. During downtime, they simply click on a special folder in Outlook. In that folder, they'll see all of their recent sent and received email and will be able to compose, reply to and forward email just as if their Exchange server was up and running.

When your system is back up internally, simply "flip the switch" back and LiveOffice will automatically forward queued email back to your environment and go back to being your "insurance policy" for your mail server.

For more details, see our detailed description and our list of Frequently-Asked Questions.

It Can't Be Free? What's the Catch?

It really is free. You don't have to buy anything else from us. I know this feels like one of those cell phone commercials and you're looking for caveats, asterisks and fine print, but you won't find any.

We just are big believers in software-as-a-service email and think that free email continuity is a great way for customers to take a step toward running their email "in the cloud."

In addition, customers that use Mail Continuity are also fully setup for LiveOffice Mail Archive. If they decide they want to start archiving their email for mailbox management, e-discovery and compliance purposes, they simply can call us, sign up for a plan and start using Mail Archive with no additional setup.

At this price, just think what we could do with $700 billion!

Sarah Palin needs Hosted Exchange

Nick Mehta — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:01:00 GMT

We all know how critical email has become for businesses and for the government. However, it's striking how many intelligent business people and leaders still use personal email accounts for business purposes, exposing their organizations to security risks, legal issues and compliance violations.

As ABC News reported:

It's not a great idea to run a government using Yahoo! e-mail accounts.

Palin and Yahoo Mail

Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail habit of using a private account to communicate with aides echos the worst practices of the Bush administration, says one expert.

That's the word from experts, anyway, reacting to news that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo! e-mail had been hacked earlier this week. McCain's vice-presidential pick reportedly used the accounts to communicate with key aides about government business.

In addition to the security problems that this story highlights, ABC News points out that messages sent in this manner are also in violation of the spirit of the need to archive and preserve public records:

Lawyer Meredith Fuchs of the Washington, D.C.-based National Security Archive has experience on this issue, having fought with the Bush White House over how it preserved emails, and why it allowed key personnel to use private email accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee. She believes Palin's email habits echo the worst practices of the Bush administration.

Government email systems typically have safeguards to preserve communications specifically for open-records purposes. "I don't know what Yahoo's policy is" on how long it saves emails, particularly after they're deleted by the user, said Fuchs, who doubted they were preserved.

That parallels the problems with White House personnel sending email through the RNC. Many of their emails "just don't exist anymore," said Fuchs. "This is very similar."

Fuchs - and open-government advocates in Alaska - worry that may be part of the governor's intent. "Maybe they did it because they thought the records wouldn't be disclosed," said Fuchs. "That raises issues possible destruction of evidence issues - if they expected litigation."

Organizations sometimes exacerbate this problem inadvertently, driving employees to use personal email. For example:

Companies that don't provide remote access to email (e.g., Microsoft Outlook Web Access or Blackberry) often leave employees with no choice but to use personal email while away from the office.
IT departments that place mailbox quotas (limits) on email often force users to leverage personal email accounts when over their limit.

Obviously email sent this way is then not aligned with company policies around email archiving, compliance or e-Discovery.

PST skeletons in the closet

Nick Mehta — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:05:00 GMT

Andrew Conry-Murray has a great blog on InformationWeek where he has recently posted some thoughtful articles on email archiving. Specifically, his latest post talks about PST files and the difference between "official policy" of most companies and the reality.

He points out that most users create PST files today:

Sixty percent of respondents to an InformationWeek survey on e-mail archiving say their users store .pst files on their own computers and removable drives. Outlook allows users to save messages, calendar entries, tasks, and other information in a personal folder on the local machine called PST. From there, these files can be moved to shared drives and removable media.

My view is that 60% is probably low. It's probably more like 300%. :)

He then talks about the contradiction in company policies around PST files:

However, only 34% of respondents expressly allow PST files, while 31% don't have a policy. (In case you're wondering, 864 business technology professionals responded to this survey.)

PST files create major problems for companies including the following:

They allow users to retain email longer than companies need or want to keep email for.
When a company has an e-Discovery request or other type of search, because of PSTs, they often have to spend a considerable amount of time and money copying data from employee desktops and laptops and searching through a mountain of information.
Employees can intentionally (leaving the company) or accidentally (leaving a laptop in the airport) give up the valuable company knowledge in their email to competitors or hackers.
PST files are typically on PCs that aren't backed up, exposing the employee and the company to lost information and productivity.
Many employees copy PST files to network hard drives to ensure they are backed up. As such, GBs or TBs of redundant email (each PST in a company often contains many duplicate messages since many individuals may have received the same email) clog up shared drives. Some companies estimate 25% - 60% of shared drive storage and backup comes from PST files.
In addition, every time a PST file is opened (whether modified or not), it "looks" like a changed file to incremental backup programs. This means PST backup is highly redundant and inefficient.
Finally, users often spend considerable time managing PST files themselves.

So let's get to the root of the issue? Why do users create PST files?

At the heart of it, one of the fundamental reasons users love PSTs is that it allows them to get around the company mailbox limits often imposed in Microsoft Exchange to keep the email server efficient, fast and easy to backup. Mailbox "quotas" attempt to solve the email storage problem but instead shift it to the "underground archives" sitting on employee PCs.

If employees instead had an unlimited email archive integrated into their email, controlled by company policies and fully-searchable, PST files become a great deal less relevant.

So to enforce your PST policies, start at the source by eliminating the need for PSTs altogether.

gmail is NOT the only "cloud" application

Nick Mehta — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:10:00 GMT

I am sitting here in Los Angeles Airport, waiting for my Friday night redeye flight, eating an ice cream cone and continuing to get disappointed by the depth of our technology media coverage.

Forbes recruited two heavy-hitters (Michael Saylor, CEO of Business Intelligence firm Microstrategy and Nicholas Carr, famous author and recent writer of the book on cloud computing, The Big Switch) to answer questions about cloud computing. I was excited to read the article, because Forbes is a great publication and Michael Saylor and Nicholas Carr are very accomplished individuals.

Nicholas Carr is a big proponent of cloud computing and has grounded and cautiously-optimistic comments on the space:

What's your imagined time line of the adoption of cloud computing? Will it take years? Decades?

If you're talking about big companies, I would say it will be a slow, steady process lasting maybe 15 to 20 years.

For consumers, cloud computing is here. Applications offered by Google and other software-as-a-service companies are already taking over traditional software. When young people want to do something, they don't go out and buy software. They look to the Web.

For small businesses, it's something in between. Because they don't have as much investment in their current IT infrastructure, they're more willing to consider hosting their entire business on something like Amazon's Web Services.

Unfortunately, Michael Saylor employs the standard "false choice" argument which can be used to attack any new technology:

* [Big company X] will never use it
* And would you trust [low-end service Y]?

In this case, he seems to imply there is nothing between consumer gmail and American Express' financial systems. Everyone attacking cloud computing loves to hold up Google as the only company running hosted applications.

What about on-demand small business accounting software? How about online customer relationship management technology? You're right - salesforce.com is a fad huh? And I'm totally biased, but I think email archiving is a great candidate for software-as-a-service.

To me, there are a number of business applications that ARE the same across small to mid-sized businesses and that CAN be outsourced. This isn't mere conjecture - it's happening today.

Saylor goes on to say:

If I were a small trucking company running a dispatch network and I need five-second response time on the phone, even then I wouldn't run my infrastructure on someone else's architecture. If it goes down, my customers go away. If it's really mission critical, you need to make people really comfortable--and that means 99.999% availability.

In terms of downtime, I always love the argument that cloud computing is somehow inferior to internally-run applications. IT departments in small to mid-sized organizations that I know often struggle to have enough capital, manpower and expertise to run systems at the levels of security, availability and performance that their users require. And how many achieve "99.999% availability"? Not many that I know.

I agree cloud computing is over-hyped and I agree big companies won't rush to it, but does that mean we should write it off altogether?

Maybe Michael Saylor should go hang out with the CEO of Lawson Software and write about how the Internet will never take off either.

Best practices in archiving: Legal holds

Nick Mehta — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:49:00 GMT

Outside a few regulated industries (e.g., financial services), many customers struggle with defining their email retention policies. What do they need to keep? How long does it need to be stored? When can it be deleted? How can an email archiving and email discovery system help with this?

Companies rightly wrestle with these challenging questions. However, there is one area where things are much more clear. When an organization is going through a lawsuit or reasonably-anticipates an upcoming lawsuit, it is obligated to preserve all information that could be related to that matter, going through a process called a legal hold. This was further codified for electronic evidence like email in the recent amendments to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

When you look at the headlines around e-Discovery violations, many of the fines and sanctions, including the recent issues Oracle is facing, are related to a failure to observe a legal hold - not a general violation of records retention. In other words, when a court, judge or matter tells you to preserve electronic records, make sure you can do it.

This requirement to keep data is there in a surprising number of circumstances:

Even if you normally would be deleting the data under you standard policies; if you have it, you need to preserve it.
Even if the data is not online (e.g., on backup tapes), in many cases, you need to preserve it (hence IT often suspends rotation of backup tapes).
Even if a formal lawsuit hasn't been filed but you reasonably-anticipate an upcoming matter, you may need to start a legal hold.

Previously, companies would enforce legal holds for email in several ways:

Ask the people who hold the data (custodians) to retain it. This might involve an email to employees asking them not to delete messages related to a topic. Obviously this depends on users actually preserving the data and sometimes creates conflicts of interest.
Ask IT to keep backup tapes of the email servers. Obviously this is very inefficient, since backup tapes are very redundant (almost the same data every day) and coarse (keep everyone's email even though you only need email from a few people). In addition, backup tapes don't capture messages received/sent and deleted in between the backup period (e.g., between the daily backup).
Ask IT, legal or an outside consultant to capture the hard drive of the employees involved. This can get very expensive and time-consuming and only captures a one-time snapshot of the user's data.

Increasingly, companies are looking to email archiving solutions and email archiving SaaS solutions in particular to allow IT and legal to enforce legal holds for email quickly and without end-user intervention while still facilitating a platform for the company's long-term retention policies, as they are defined.

In other words, organizations should continue to deliberate their retention policies but many are looking to make sure they are not exposed around legal holds today.

Best practices in archiving: Blocking and tackling

Nick Mehta — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:34:00 GMT

Today is the first sunday of the NFL season! (I say that with uncontrollable enthusiasm) And while many fans aspire to see their teams run flea-flickers, reverses and Statue of Liberty plays, most smart coaches know that it's important to start with the basics - blocking and tackling.

Martin Tuip on his Archiving101 blog has a great post about not losing sight of "blocking and tackling" when setting your archiving policies - or KISS, as Martin says. As someone who's seen thousands of archiving customers over the years, Martin's thinking really resonated with me.

Many customers struggle with a desire to design a perfect system:

Every message is automatically categorized.
The system figures out what every message really "means."
It never makes any mistakes.
It requires no human intervention.
It keeps everything only as long as necessary, and no longer.

They sit in committees and vendor pitches, waiting for the nirvana solution to emerge. Meanwhile:

Email storage continues to explode.
Email backup windows grow every day.
Users continue to create "underground" archives on their PCs.
Backup tapes accumulate for legal holds and retention.
IT is stuck restoring tapes and imaging PCs to respond to legal requests.
Legal is unsure whether legal holds are really being enforced.

In other words, companies wait to design the perfect play, but get stuck not moving the ball at all and having to punt it away.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and the "mid-tail"

Nick Mehta — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:17:00 GMT

I'm a firm believer that over time, software-as-a-service (SaaS) will appeal to companies of all sizes.

However, we are seeing, as are many of our SaaS brethren, that a good chunk of the early adopters for SaaS fall into the "mid-tail" of businesses. Mid-sized companies, with anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand employees, seem to be in the perfect sweet spot for SaaS in general.

The Enterprise Strategy Group commissioned a survey on the subject:

The Milford, MA-based analyst firm polled 544 IT decision makers at midsize organizations with 100 to 999 employees, and in a companion survey, polled 234 North American IT channel partners. More than one-third of the respondents said they're making some production use of SaaS offerings. Another 28% of participants said they aren't currently using hosted services but are likely to implement them in the next 24 months.

Congratulations to Google on Chrome!

Nick Mehta — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:14:00 GMT

Kudos to Google for their innovation with Google Chrome, their new web browser that was just introduced in BETA.

Beyond having one of the most creative marketing campaigns I've seen in a while, Google introduced a great offering that should help individuals, businesses and companies trying to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS). As the browser gets better, SaaS gets better too. And I'm personally excited to get rid of these annoying Firefox browser crashes when I have 25 tabs open. :)

More than compliance: Email archiving and employee turnover

Nick Mehta — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:08:00 GMT

Most companies typically think of email archiving solutions as helping to mitigate cost and risk - namely:

Reduce compliance risk by automatically retaining emails for regulations, records management policies and/or legal holds
Reduce e-Discovery cost by allowing legal staff to search, refine and review emails and attachments, eliminating the need for expensive backup and laptop restores, data processing services and attorney review time
Reduce storage and backup time and cost by giving the user a scalable, Unlimited Mailbox without clogging up the primary email system

This post is the beginning of a series of blog entries on how email archiving "in the cloud" can allow companies to drive business value, not just reduce cost and risk.

As a CEO, I always think about cost and risk but frankly even higher up on my agenda are things like:

Improving client satisfaction
Driving sales growth
Enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity

On that third point, most CEOs specifically struggle with questions like the following:

How do I retain my talented employees?
When employees leave (and some will), how do I retain their knowledge for the company?
How do I transition this knowledge to their replacements so I can on-board them quickly?

As we all know now, email has become our filing cabinet or, in more modern terms, our "data warehouse" for all of our unstructured information. As such, it is a curse (if not managed) or a blessing (if properly controlled) with respect to employee turnover.

The curse is the way things normally work:

Employee leaves
Employee takes PST/NSF (personal archive) files with all old email from company
Employer loses intellectual property and knowledge
If employee goes to competitor, things could be even worse
New employee taking over job has to start from scratch
What were our latest interactions with clients?
What promises did we make internally?
What did last year's proposal look like so I don't have to start over?
Sales cycles slow, customer satisfaction is damaged and employees themselves struggle

With an email archive, companies can:

Prevent employees from taking their email with them (by disabling the need for PST creation and giving employees an Unlimited Mailbox in corporate control, rather than islands of "underground archives" in the form of PST/NSF files)
Preserve knowledge and IP in company control during inevitable employee turnover
Transition the information to the new employee by giving him/her access to the archive (or a subset) from the employee whom she or he is replacing

Lawson CEO has head in the clouds

Nick Mehta — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:00:00 GMT

As anyone within a 100 mile radius of me knows, I'm a crazy NFL football fan. As you know, the NFL, like all businesses, evolves. Youngsters might look to recent progress like the popularity of the 3-4 defense or the Patriots' approach to player selection. Folks of the previous generation recall the advent of Bill Walsh's West Coast offense. True students of the game probably remember the changes that ensued with quarterback and receiver-friendly rule adjustments during the 1970s and 1980s.

But is there someone out there, perhaps beyond octogenerian status, who decries the pass-happy NFL of today and longs for the golden age of the 1920s, before the advent of the forward pass? If so, that person should meet Harry Debes, CEO of on-premise ERP software vendor Lawson Software. I think the two would get along fabulously.

That's a bit tongue in cheek. In his interview attacking software-as-a-service (SaaS) on ZDNet, Debes makes some valid points including:

SaaS companies are less profitable than traditional licensed software companies: "Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability." He's totally right. The beautiful "old world" of licensed software allowed you to build software once and sell it over and over again with minimal marginal cost, giving companies like Microsoft crazy-high net profit margins. Customers were left with tons of shelfware, delayed projects and exploding budgets, but the vendors still collected their checks. In the SaaS world (like email archiving or hosted Exchange), we take the burden of running technology off customers' hands, so SaaS vendors get less short-term revenue and profit. This is pure economics. Markets evolve to drive down "above-normal" profit margins over time and shift more value to customers.
SaaS is hyped: "People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years." Like any new industry, SaaS will go through its hype cycle. No doubt. But just because something is hyped (e.g., the Internet, mobile phones or Lost), doesn't mean it's not valuable.
On-premise solutions lock you in: "The cost of moving is too high. As long as it's working, people are happy to stick with one product." And yes, I think all of us in the SaaS world would agree that customers get locked-in to on-premise software (not sure if he's supporting his point here though :) )

And overall, I'm sure Debes is a very smart and capable guy. You couldn't get to be CEO of such a great and successful company without having a number of strong attributes. As a CEO of a much-smaller company, I'm sure there is a ton that I could learn from Debes.

However, the tone of his interview is that SaaS will never go anywhere and that's where a small army and I would probably beg to differ. In many ways, this is a perfect example of the concept popularized by the Clayton Christensen book The Innovator's Dilemma:

Small but rapidly-growing market (SaaS)
Less attractive to entrenched players (on-premise software vendors) than existing markets
Written off as nothing (too small, not profitable)
Becomes big over time (3-5 years from now)
New generation of companies emerge (salesforce.com and ???)

It happened in hard disk drives (as the book discussed). It took place with the introduction of Personal Computers (my dad was a long-time executive at Digital Equipment Corporation, a company that missed this boat). We lived through it in the transition to digital music. And we're seeing it now with the emergence of SaaS.

The obvious disclaimer is that I am a self-admitted SaaS "fanboy" and have written many times on the virtues of SaaS.

As with most arguments in life, however, this is not a black-and-white discussion. To frame it as such makes this a false choice. It's not EITHER SaaS is dead OR on-premise is extinct. I think we're just witnessing the beginning of a mass transformation that will take many years to complete. Don't forget - physical travel agencies, in-person brokerage firms and Blockbuster Video still exist - they're just less relevant now after Orbitz, E*TRADE and Netflix.

For some time, many big companies will be too entrenched with internal biases or complex processes to adopt SaaS, so its initial value will come from serving the mid to long "tail" of customers who are more willing to embrace on-demand. So Debes is right that large enterprises aren't all running to SaaS any time soon. Luckily there are enough small-to-mid-sized organizations that have been unsatisfied by on-premise technology over the years that the market is very robust (robust enough to make us profitable for several years running, in fact).

Fundamentally, SaaS makes things possible that never were there before, including:

Near-immediate time-to-value
Pay-as-you-go with transparent cost of ownership
Integrate in the cloud

So it's not just about attacking the on-premise market. Instead this is about something bigger - creating a new, broader and better market than the one that existed before. To me, that's the exciting part of my job - that we can create value for companies that never existed previously.

Apparently Debes has different aspirations for his company's value:

"Getting signed up as a SaaS customer is fast, but getting out is just as fast. Whereas traditional software is like cocaine--you're hooked. It's too difficult and expensive to switch providers once you've invested in one. If it were easier to jump ship, a lot of people would've hit the eject button on SAP a long time ago."

I don't know about you, but my mom didn't raise me to be no drug dealer. :) And I love it when my Pittsburgh Steelers throw downfield. I guess I'm just caught up in the hype.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and integration

Nick Mehta — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:51:00 GMT

I've written a great deal (as have others) about the benefits of SaaS in the email archiving and Microsoft Exchange hosting worlds in terms of usability (here and here), deployment times, storage management and innovation.

But all of those points above are very IT-centric, since on-premise software is inherently IT-centric.

What I've found is that senior business leadership at companies (e.g., how I think about my company) don't think in terms of technology or systems - they think about business problems they are trying to solve. One of the fundamental challenges for IT since the dawn of time (or at least the mainframe) has been to connect systems together so that technology aligns with business processes and business value.

The problem is that when your technologies are running on-premise, this is really difficult. Each technology has different architectures, interfaces, infrastructure and teams to manage it and customers end up deploying NEW systems (remember Enterprise Application Integration?) to connect those silos together. What a mess!

One of the benefits of software-as-a-service that's only getting attention recently is that customers running their applications "in the cloud" can also connect those applications together more easily to mirror their business processes.

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet has a great post on his SaaS blog about this trend in general ("SaaS mashups" as he describes them). In particular, he highlights an innovative vendor Xactly that recently announced a 5-way SaaS integration:

As a case in point, take Xactly's 5-way mashup, announced Monday (image courtesy of Xactly). Using Salesforce.com's Force.com platform as the foundation, the SaaS vendor has mashed up its own sales compensation application with Amazon.com's retail catalog, the Paypal payment system and an iGoogle gadget. The mashup creates an enterprise-class incentive rewards management and fulfilment application that at the same time is economical enough to be affordable for smaller businesses - subscriptions will be $10 per user per month, at the end of a 90-day free-of-charge launch window that ends December 1st.

So how could an email SaaS platform tie into the other SaaS business applications organizations are using like online CRM, HR and accounting packages? More to come on that...

Email management workarounds: HitMeLater

Nick Mehta — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:47:00 GMT

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch profiled HitMeLater today.

Per Michael, it attempts to solve the email deluge problem many users face:

HitMeLater is simple. Forward any email to 24@hitmelater.com and it will send it back to you 24 hours later, putting it on the top of your inbox pile. You can change the number of hours to anything you like, up to 1,000 hours ahead (3@hitmelater.com sends it back three hours later). Alternatively, put in a day (Wednesday@hitmelater sends it back the next Wednesday). If you send it something it doesn't understand, HitMeLater sends back a polite email message saying "We're not sure what you want."

While I understand that people (including me) are flooded with email, I don't quite get why they aren't able to use Outlook (if Outlook is their email platform) to manage it. Outlook has had "follow-up" flags for years and has search folders which automatically let you see all messages across all folders with flags. It seems like HitMeLater is trying to do the same thing? Seems like overkill for a simple use case.

I have a unique email management style where I simply leave everything in my email inbox (I don't have to worry about quotas, since my email is automatically archived :) ). I use the read/unread flag as a mark for messages that I need to attend to. If I view something and still have to process it, I re-mark it unread. Then I use the Outlook search folder "unread" to see all unread messages.

I moved away from foldering a few years ago to save time (since I didn't have to worry about quotas) and decided that read/unread was the fastest method to process email in Outlook (you can toggle read/unread with hotkeys easily) and you can toggle read/unread from mobile devices as well.

I guess everyone has their own system, huh? :)

Email archiving: A baby step into the cloud

Nick Mehta — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:53:00 GMT

Since I'm on the theme of Bill Murray movies, my mother-in-law's all-time favorite and one of my personal top picks as well is the 1991 classic What About Bob?

In the movie, where a supposedly-insane Bill Murray (Bob) drives his therapist (Richard Dreyfus) even crazier, Bob learns about a method of therapy involving taking "baby steps" toward challenges.

As you know, there is a ton of hype and some substance around the idea of cloud computing (or XaaS as CIO Insight put it, in a recent article) where companies leverage external infrastructure for applications, rather than building everything themselves.

In this vein, many companies are now looking at their email infrastructure and trying to decide whether to use a hosted service (e.g., Hosted Microsoft Exchange) or continue to run an email service on internal servers.

However, a few companies that I have spoken with struggle with whether they're ready to pull the trigger on outsourcing email altogether. Some are aggressively moving forward - particularly if they have to upgrade their email infrastructure anyways (e.g., to Microsoft Exchange 2007).

Others are finding an interesting baby step: start by archiving your email to a hosted service provider to:

Reduce your storage costs and backup windows for email.
Give your users an Unlimited Mailbox without the need for quotas or PST files.
Create a searchable repository for e-Discovery and other legal searches.

Archiving is a great way to start in the cloud since it's typically a new project, not core to most businesses, expensive to build internally and surprisingly-complex to run in-house.

Once a company has its email archived with a service provider, a few things happen:

The company now has experience with the "cloud" and can determine whether to go deeper.
The company also has its historical email hosted. If its service provider also provides hosted messaging, a future migration to a fully-hosted email platform is much easier (since the biggest time in an email migration is in copying the data from the old email system to the new one).

Why SMBs need to think about e-Discovery too

Nick Mehta — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:14:00 GMT

George Crump posted a great writeup on InformationWeek's storage blog about how email archiving and e-Discovery are problems that affect all companies - big and small:

George lists three great reasons why small companies should be looking at this issue:

1. Has your business ever been sued? 95% of all discovery requests involve e-mail. 65% now ask for other forms of data (office productivity, CAD diagrams, etc). You must be able to not only deliver this information quickly after the request, but also at the request you need to know what you have and state what you are planning to deliver.

2. Have any employees? Ever have any leave because they weren't happy or you weren't happy with them? (if you answered no to question one and yes to this question, go back and change your first answer to yes.

3. Ever need to reference a previous piece of work as a starting point to save time or to upgrade or add on? Data retention is not just about being prepared for bad things, it is also about using your digital assets as... well... an asset, to help you save time on the next project, addition or redesign.

He also profiles LiveOffice Mail Archive as a possible solution for this need:

What makes LiveOffice interesting is how mature it is in the space, with more than 7,500 customers in eight years of business.

Google Apps downtime

Nick Mehta — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:29:00 GMT

As I've written before, I find it amusing how my brethren in Silicon Valley think Microsoft is dead and that Google will inevitably win in the business software world. While I don't think you can ever underestimate Google, given the talent of the team that they've assembled (it truly is remarkable), I also don't think Microsoft will just go quietly into the night.

In particular, I think Google will end up having to learn how different the challenge is to sell paid software to businesses versus giving free (ad-supported) software to consumers. While I have no doubt that they will figure it out, it will certainly take time.

Some of the recent outages Google Apps (Google's enterprise email/productivity offering) has had illustrate these growing pains. As IDG pointed out in its article on the subject, the customer outrage was about the response and communication from Google as much as it was about the downtime itself:

In the main Google Apps Discussion Group thread devoted to this incident, administrators complained loudly about the length of the outage and the lack of status update details offered by Google officials ...

"Seriously... It has been two hours. Can you provide us with another update? For a company with your reputation, I'm absolutely shocked at the apparent absence of customer service," wrote a Google Apps administrator on the discussion forum on Wednesday. "This amount of down time is unacceptable."

Phil Wainewright wrote a great post on ZDNet questioning whether Google's corporate culture is conducive to building enterprise technology. He quotes the resignation announcement of engineer Sergey Solyanik from Google, who talked about some of the challenges Google faces in the enterprise.

"[T]he culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked. Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google."

Knowing many folks at Google myself, I think this characterization is unfair. They value user experience as much as any company I've ever met. However, I do think there are some unique aspects to the business technology world that Google is learning as it grows.

Welcome Frank Sansone!

Nick Mehta — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Today, we announced that Frank Sansone is joining our family at LiveOffice as Chief Financial Officer.

Frank was previously CFO at Guidance Software, a public software company and leader in e-Discovery.

We liked Frank for many reasons, but three really stood out:

e-Discovery is one of the main drivers for email archiving and Frank's experience at Guidance is very relevant for our business and for our clients.
Frank was at Guidance from its roots as a small private company to the public and rapidly growing firm it is today. As such, Frank will help us scale our operations to meet our clients' needs.
Most importantly, Frank is a huge NFL fan, like most of us here. Sadly, he roots for the Miami Dolphins, but hopefully I'll get him converted to my Steelers over time.

Welcome, Frank!

To stub or not to stub

Nick Mehta — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:56:00 GMT

Bob Spurzem on the Ferris Research blog wrote a good post today on a method of archiving called stubbing. Bob was referring to a recent Microsoft TechNet article on the topic claiming that Microsoft was recommending against stubbing.

Stubbing involves replacing items in the email server (e.g., Microsoft Exchange) with a stub or pointer that refers to the original message and attachments in the archive.

While a number of vendors try to make the issue black-and-white (i.e., stubbing is great or stubbing is bad), I personally think it's simply a tradeoff:

Pro: Stubbing allows the management of the message to remain in the normal folder structure, since the "stub" remains in Outlook and Exchange.
Con: However, Bob and others are correct that the stubs themselves over time can clog up Exchange and cause performance issues. One of the main reasons for this is that item counts (i.e., how many messages you have) often drive performance bottlenecks in Outlook and Exchange as much as does mailbox size.

I think stubbing is great for giant enterprises that can manage some of the complexity in order to benefit from the folder integration. However, for smaller organizations or ones with limited IT resources, the simplicity of pointing users to an archive folder or archive search tool often wins out.

Again, it's not a good-versus-bad situation but it's good to know the tradeoffs between the alternatives.

Exchange backups: Groundhog Day?

Nick Mehta — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:04:00 GMT

Do you remember Groundhog Day? It was the 1993 Bill Murray film about a guy who relives a day of his life over and over again. It featured the classic line:

This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.

In any case, I think the way we stick to the weekly tradition of full Exchange tape backups is like a bad recurring dream. Lots of the same stuff over and over again.

Today, I spoke with the blogger and former storage CTO George Crump who had a great post on his blog, Storage Switzerland, about how full backups are becoming a thing of the past in general.

I think this is particularly true for email, where users and lawyers want and demand the granularity of a message - not the granularity of a tape.

Many clients backup Exchange every day with incremental backups and innovative disk-to-disk technologies and yet still perform full backups to retain data for legal discovery or data retention purposes.

If all of your data is in a hosted archive, full Exchange backups and retaining tapes for long periods of time become something admins can cross off of their ever-growing to-do list. This saves tape media, tape storage and precious IT time.

So they can move on to the next day.

The inconvenient truth: Item counts matter

Nick Mehta — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:28:00 GMT

The conventional wisdom in the Microsoft Exchange administrator base is that mailboxes are getting too big in terms of size, hence the advent of quotas and email archiving solutions to reduce mailbox sizes.

However, many Microsoft Exchange gurus have now realized that the number of items in a mailbox and a folder matters as much in some cases as the size of the mailbox itself.

Bob Spurzem at Ferris Research points this out on his blog. He refers to a great technical article on Microsoft TechNet on the same topic which includes the following:

Folder contents are stored in a table in the information store database. As the number of items increases, there is a corresponding growth in storage complexity. The storage mechanism for the Exchange store is the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE). ESE uses B+ tree data structures to store records. As the number of records increases, the potential number of disk I/O requests that are required to locate the information and traverse the B+ tree also increases. For more information, see Extensible Storage Engine Architecture.

As the number of items increases, the possibility of any requested data being located on physically adjacent locations on the hard disk is greatly diminished. Therefore, more I/O requests are required.

Martin Tuip, on his Archiving 101 blog, mentioned this issue a few weeks ago as well.

As Martin points out, and as I know from experience, the traditional approach of archiving messages out of Exchange but still replacing them with a small message ("stub") that's a pointer to the original sometimes has challenges. The fact is that if you replace every 5 MB email with a 1 KB email, you'll cut mailbox size but still retain high item count. Indeed, the lack of mailbox size will encourage users to store more items in the long run.

There are a number of solutions to this problem - from:

Pruning stubs over time (how many on-premise products handle it)
Not using stubs at all and directing users to search instead

There is no perfect answer here, but users should be aware that mailbox size is only one of several issues to consider.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and usability part II

Nick Mehta — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:16:00 GMT

David Ferris at the Ferris Research blog has written a quick post on LiveOffice and the trade-offs of having tons of functionality versus ensuring usability.

I find the ad salesforce.com is running in magazines to be the best description of how SaaS vendors should think about product development.

Salesforce.com shows a napkin that has a big circle drawn on it with "all CRM functionality" written inside and a smaller intersecting circle with "all CRM functionality you actually use" which is what they then focus on.

SaaS is about building software where the features actually get used by everyone rather than having a bunch of features that most people don't use and which clutter up and confuse the experience for everyone else.

Obviously for super-complex mega-companies, that may not be enough, but for the typical business or organization, it's all about the 80/20 rule.

Quota management: You have better things to do!

Nick Mehta — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:50:00 GMT

David Sengupta on the Ferris Research blog has a great post on the time people spend managing email.

How much of your time do you spend moving email out of your inbox into Personal Folders (PST files in Microsoft Outlook parlance) to make sure your inbox stays under your email quota? How much time do your users or employees spend doing the same thing?

As I've explained before, I believe filing and foldering is a concept from the paper world that was adopted into the electronic world (where do you think the name "file system" came from?) and grandfathered into the Internet world.

Unfortunately, with the volume of information we deal with every day, I firmly believe that foldering will prove to be unsustainable over time. Google doesn't "folder" the Internet and the company that tried (Yahoo! with its directory) got passed by.

Regardless as to where you stand on that religious debate, foldering email to get under quota is definitely like the Whac-A-Mole game David Sengupta describes.

As he says:

Why not work with the archiving vendors and move data straight to the archive instead of to myriad folders in the inbox?

Well said!

One search to rule them all

Nick Mehta — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:51:00 GMT

In email archiving, there are basically two strategies for capturing messages:

Capture everything OR
Capture everything that matches a certain criteria (e.g., email older than 30 days is "stubbed" out of Exchange)

Method 2 is great, is very popular with on-premise email archiving products and has a number of advantages.

However, one of the big disadvantages is that the end-user in Outlook has two repositories:

Email "younger" than 30 days lives in Outlook and is searchable by Outlook search tools
Email older than 30 days lives in archive and is searchable by archive search tools

The user now has to figure out how old the email is that he's looking for and determine which repository to search. In many cases, he or she may not know for sure and therefore would have to search both. Finally, the search semantics (e.g., whether the engine searches attachments, how search terms are constructed, etc.) may differ between Outlook search and the archive.

Some on-premise vendors get around this by integrating their archive into a desktop search engine (like Windows Desktop Search) and allowing users to search the archive and Outlook from the desktop search engine. The challenge is that many users don't have or use these desktop search engines.

One of the nice things about method #1 (capture everything) is that the user has one place to search and no confusion over where his or her email is. Again, it's a tradeoff, but this method (full disclosure - of course, the method that LiveOffice uses) may be more usable for some users.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and usability

Nick Mehta — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:41:00 GMT

Martin Tuip, on his Archiving101 blog, has a great post on the importance of usability in email archiving systems. I agree with him that the word "usability" is thrown around without much precision in the technology industry.

And with all of the immensely-"usable" products in the IT industry, we are stuck editing XML files and configuring registry settings through the dark of night. :)

I've always had a preference for the word "consumability" (yes I know - that's not really a word). We think of consumability as being a measure of the pain (or lack thereof) involved in customers consuming and getting value out of your technology.

Consumability goes beyond user interface and documentation and touches on the entire experience. From the wikipedia article above, this includes:

Installation
Configuration
Maintenance
Problem determination
User experience

One of the beautiful and challenging things about software-as-a-service is that you are forced into consumability whether you like it or not.

At LiveOffice, as an example, we are serving 1000s of clients (small and large) and need to be very automated and predictable in the way that we deploy, configure and maintain our technology for our customers. If every customer involved a "man behind the curtain" tweaking config files, we'd be out of business.

Similarly, our users pay per month, so they expect value every month and demand a solution that they can actually use. One of the fundamental differences between an on-premise, licensed product and a software-as-a-service solution is that license vendors get paid for sales, while SaaS vendors get paid for usage.

Shelfware for on-premise vendors, while disappointing, is still money.

Shelfware for SaaS vendors leads to empty bank accounts.

Condolences to Randy Pausch's family and to us all

Nick Mehta — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:04:00 GMT

This has nothing to do with LiveOffice or email.

As you may know, Carnegie Mellon University professor and YouTube star, Randy Pausch passed away on Friday at age 47.

If you haven't seen his famous "Last Lecture" on "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," you should stop reading this blog and watch it now. It's inspirational and changed the life perspectives of millions of people including your's truly.

The world lost a great soul on Friday. But if any of us have 1/100th the joy in life and impact on the world as Dr. Pausch had in his last year, we should count ourselves blessed.

I wish sincere condolences and prayers for peace to Dr. Pausch's family.

Email management: The end of folders?

Nick Mehta — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:41:00 GMT

David Ferris at Ferris Research has a great blog post on foldering versus search for email management.

It's interesting how my own use of folders has evolved over the years. Back at my first startup in 1998, I would file every email into very granular folders like the following that sat in my Personal Folders (PST Files):

Clients

A

Acme Corp.

ABC Corp.

B

Engineering

Marketing

I would even file "Sent Items" into the appropriate folder. Yes - I was pretty nerdy.

A funny thing happened once I started using an email archiving system (initially Enterprise Vault while I worked at VERITAS and Symantec and now LiveOffice since we are a small business): I decided that the amount of time I was spending simply dragging emails into folders was becoming non-trivial.

Like many folks, I get between 200 and 400 messages a day, and as such, email drag-and-drop was eating up time. And because I use an email archiving system, I don't have to worry about email quotas, so dragging emails out of my inbox is no longer necessary.

So I keep everything in my inbox and archive it off. When I need to find something, I search for it.

To me, with the increasing amount of information we receive every day, foldering as a metaphor (which, don't forget, came from our filing cabinet days :) ) will not scale forever.

I agree with Ferris' argument that foldering is still better in some cases since search isn't perfect, but for me, giving up foldering was a big time saver.

In defense of email

Nick Mehta — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:19:00 GMT

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, a few things seem to happen every year with certainty:

Taxes
Brett Favre (un)retirement rumors
Articles prognosticating the end of email

And while tax codes are silly and Favre is fun, these articles are often downright ridiculous.

Sadly, many of the "email is dead" predictions hope to lure readers into the same false choice that is the hallmark of "provocative" journalism. Is email dead? Yes or no. Is America's economy in trouble? Circle Y or N. Is the world in trouble? If we keep our dialog at this level, it certainly will be.

Let me preface my response by saying that I am biased. I am self-aware and self-described email bigot. I like email and find it (like millions of others) to be very valuable. In fact, I like it so much that I banked my career on it.

But I find it frustrating how predictable these email eulogy articles (which seem to come out every year) have become. The typical one goes something like this:

Don't you get too much email? [emotional blackmail appeal to reader]
I get too much email too [I feel your pain and am very important so don't feel bad if you don't hear back from me]
[x] study reveals people get too much email [like you need a study to prove this]
The problem is that email is broken - here's why

Email is full of spam and viruses
Email is used for too many things for which it wasn't intended [cite trite example of editing documents through email]
Email is overwhelming
Email is irrelevant to teenagers
Email is unproductive

The solution is [insert technology of day - IM, blogs, wikis, twitter]
And it's all Microsoft's fault

Let's tackle these issues point-by-point:

1. Email is full of spam and viruses.

No one can deny this. Spam creates a chain around our collective, virtual necks in terms of productivity. However, the naivete in this argument is that spam somehow will not follow us into whatever communication medium (e.g., facebook) we use heavily. The fact is that we have zero marginal cost of communicating to the sender (no postage stamp) and a high profit potential for Unwanted Commercial Email (the friendly name for spam). When there is money, our world finds a way. So spam, while an issue that needs to be prosecuted with viglience, is not an email issue - it's a communications issue.

2. Email is used for too many things for which it wasn't intended.

Like spam, this falls into the "victim of its own success" category. Email definitely wasn't designed for large file transfers, group document editing or huge broadcasts. But its universality and flexibility outweigh many of these limitations.

As Andrew Mcafee points out in his 9x email argument, new technologies that are "better" for certain use cases (like document collaboration) have a very high bar in that they have to be way better (9 times as much) to justify switching off of something that works so universally. Andrew rightly points out that these new tools aren't "direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't."

You know what other things are used for applications for which they weren't intended? Radio. Television. Phones. PCs. x86 chips. The Internet. In communications, general-purpose, universal and "good enough" media are often the most effective.

3. Email is overwhelming.

I empathize on this one, because email is hard to deal with. Once you get into the hundreds of messages per day, you are in a different ballgame in terms of time management. I've spent countless hours coaching my various teams on how to best manage and process email.

That being said, email is again being held up as a scapegoat for the larger fact that near-zero-marginal-cost, near-instant communications allow far more connections between people than ever before possible. This is great in many ways but we as a society are being forced to adjust to the consequences and are trying to find the balance.

The only reason email is the obvious poster child is because it is the medium of choice. As with spam, if facebook takes over, we'll start talking about needing therapy for handling our facebook wall messages. Authors, as in the ReadWriteWeb article mentioned above, sometimes try to point out that the email user interface itself is overwhelming:

"The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.
With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up."

The fallacy in this logic is the fact that we are confusing the interface implementation (e.g., Microsoft Outlook email client) with the medium itself (email). As you probably know, anyone can build an email client and thousands exist today. Indeed, many clients (including Microsoft Outlook) include auto-preview functionality that shows the body of the message without a "click."

4. Email is irrelevant to teenagers.

I fully agree with this one, speaking from highly non-scientific, subjective data (nieces, nephews, etc.). As new children learn technology, they aren't bound by the principles and habits of the past, so they latch on to the latest and greatest (e.g., texting or social networks).

However, it will take generations for us email "luddites" to be worked through the system. So to declare defeat for email any time soon is premature.

Indeed, some of the analysis mistakenly attacks the popular implementation of an email client versus the medium itself. For example, this article on cnet talks about the fact that other media are much more available through mobile devices than email is. Any Blackberry user knows that email can be as mobile as anything else out there.

The main fact here is that the very same network effect that makes email so popular in the 30+ crowd (we use email because other people use email) is what limits it for the new generation (many teens don't use email, so therefore many teens don't use email).

However, us 30+ers plan to live for a few years to come.

5. Email is unproductive.

This point is the most relevant to business managers and the most troublesome in my opinion. The argument is that email interrupts your daily flow and makes you less efficient. For example, this study says that 28% of business time goes to "interruptions by things that aren't urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages."

I 100% agree that interruptions (of any form) are killers of effectiveness. Like many, I try to turn off my email client whenever I want to get work done.

However, to say that the email "inbox" somehow is unique in its "interruptive"-ness is logically incorrect.

Our inbox simply represents our spot on the modern assembly line at which we look for new things to do. As anyone who flies a lot and has seen the Blackberries and iPhones pop up religiously as the wheels hit the ground, email is our habitual center and source of truth for what to do next.

If we have an issue with email being unproductive, we really have an issue with the amount of time we spend as workers "reacting" to others' priorities (the queue of email you have is set by others) versus creating based upon our own priorities.

And we also have to admit that the inbox is comforting. It tells you what to do. You can do it often and easily (reply-to-all with a "thanks" for example). And you often get near-instant validation (especially if the recipient is as addicted as you are).

Why do we check email when we wake up, when we go to bed and all throughout the day? Because we're addicted - not to email, but rather to the satisfaction and feedback loop that comes from a pre-defined queue of work.

Respond to others' priorities is easier.

This is definitely a problem, because left to its extreme, we won't create anything.

But eliminating email will simply shift our queue somewhere else (twitter, SMS, etc.)

Indeed, voicemail used to be the old "to do list" and has been written off by many including your's truly, because email is at least easier to manage.

Conclusions

Clearly we have to learn to use email better.
And the email clients need to continue to be more usable.
Spam and viruses are simply the result of email's popularity and will follow to the next communication medium of choice.
It's been hard to match the universality and flexibility of email - and the bar for new media is much higher.
In many ways, new communication media are really additions rather than substitutes for email.
We can switch off of email, but the queue will follow us somewhere...
...until we reconcile as businesses and a society how much reacting versus creating we actually want to be doing.
Teenagers probably will not use email as heavily as we do, but they will still likely have some queue that guides their daily activities.
So email is still alive and kicking.

Comments welcome. Or you can just email me.

The reports of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated

Nick Mehta — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:52:00 GMT

Here's a conversation that happened at least twenty times with my startup friends in Silicon Valley when I told them I was taking the CEO role at LiveOffice:

Friend: So what does LiveOffice do?

Nick: We provide email archiving and Microsoft Exchange through software-as-a-service.

Friend: Exchange? Do people still use that?

Nick: Yeah - there are like 150 MM+ seats of Exchange out there actually and it's growing 30-40% per year.

Friend: Really? I heard Microsoft is going out of business or something on techcrunch.

Nick: Umm...

Friend: And by the way... email is pretty much dead with facebook, twitter and all.

Nick: Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'll let you get back to "mashing" things up or whatever it is that you do.

You can definitely get stuck in your own little bubble if you don't watch out.

From my experience at Symantec leading the Enterprise Vault team and now at LiveOffice, I can say that the Microsoft ecosystem and customer base around email is still alive and kicking.

Obviously Google has created a compelling alternative with Google Apps. But I've found that many customers still love the tight integration of Microsoft Outlook, Office and Exchange as well as the huge network of technologies and technologists around it. For the thousands of SMB clients we serve, we see that users are very comfortable with Microsoft Outlook as an interface and are loathe to switch.

Personally, I still haven't found a Web-based email service that allows you to get through emails as quickly as you can with Outlook. But I'm biased. :)

And sure - email will evolve over the long run and will at some point be end-of-lifed. But folks have been saying that for nearly a decade and my inbox volume hasn't missed a beat. As the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead." Between now and then, I'll keep checking my Blackberry, thank you very much.

This article about a Google employee going back to Microsoft (from where he originally came) made me think about how skewed the view is between Silicon Valley ("Microsoft is dead, Google has taken over and actually is in decline because Facebook is the new king") and the rest of the world. My favorite quote (probably apt to describe much of Web 2.0 in general sadly):

"This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter."

I also thought this was interesting:

"This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."

So in any case, we in the SaaS industry will watch with amusement as Google and Microsoft duke it out and the Bay Area writes off Redmond. Meanwhile, we'll eagerly service the "niche" 150 MM+ user Microsoft Exchange ecosystem.

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and deployment times

Nick Mehta — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:23:00 GMT

To all of the other dads in the world out there, Happy Father's Day! I enjoyed Sunday with a trip to the children's museum, some touch football with my buddies and fellow dads, tasty BBQ and rocking Guitar Hero on the Wii. And lots of love throughout. I hope your day was as wonderful as mine was.

Back to business, as a leader, I've always been a nut about the importance of on-time delivery. Whether it's releasing a new software version or launching a new website, it's critical to be predictable. So many other people and organizations (internal and external) build around your scheduled date. So slipping creates a snowball effect.

This is why I have always been so fascinated by how long it takes to get on-premise email archiving software deployed. I would find that customers often took several months and in some cases years to get internal archiving projects fully up and running. This was despite all of our significant efforts as vendors to simplify the installation process.

Over time, I realized that client delays in deployment were only partially related to software installation:

Delays in storage configuration. In many organizations, storage is a separate discipline and sometimes a distinct organization. As I described, the process of choosing, sizing, procuring and provisioning storage is non-trivial. Obviously with a SaaS email archiving solution, the storage is automatically provisioned and scaled behind the scenes.
Delays in server configuration. Customers typically have a standard server vendor. But they often struggle deciding how many servers they need to handle the archiving load and also maintain reliability. Most on-premise vendors offer excellent sizing guides. But many of these documents are 50-100 pages and still require follow-up consultation with the vendor and/or their partner. In a SaaS deployment, customers don't have to think about sizing or servers - they simply think about the service that they need.
Delays in selecting and scheduling professional services. Nearly every on-premise email archiving vendor recommends or requires professional services for installation and deployment. If you are choosing an on-premise solution, I highly recommend this route as the complexity is significant; you should trust the experts. Some vendors offer services through their own firm. Others also offer services through partners. Customers often need to decide on which partner is the most proficient (or whether to use the vendor directly). Then they need to negotiate on rates and terms. Finally, they have to schedule the consultant(s) to come on-site. Not surprisingly, given how hot email archiving is, getting a consultant on-site can often take 4-6 weeks or more. Clearly with a SaaS email archiving offering, the software is already deployed; all that is required is to personalize it for your needs.
Delays because you have to get it right the first time. Most significantly, customers know that they have to "get it right the first time" with an on-premise deployment. It takes so long that you absolutely can't go through it again. So customers often spend weeks in committee meetings to make sure everyone buys off on the approach. Anyone that works in an organization of any size knows that universal consensus can take a while. One of the beautiful aspects of SaaS email archiving is that you can get up and running right away and tweak it as you go.

In reality, the "next-next-next" of the Windows installer for the on-premise product is often the smallest part of the deployment time. On-premise vendors can only go so far in terms of addressing this issue.

In contrast, SaaS email archiving solutions are up in running in hours to days, not weeks to months to years. Customers simply configure their email server to domain to forward/journal email to us. We take care of the rest.

I hate delays. :)

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and storage management

Nick Mehta — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:53:00 GMT

It's easy to get lost in your own little world. But life is very good at bringing you back to reality on a regular basis.

I remember going to a family function a few years ago. A very well-educated friend of my parents' who happened to be a physician asked me what industry I'm in. Having been a new, eager employee to what was then called VERITAS Software Corporation, and having drunk the Kool-Aid of our mission to change the world with our "No Hardware Agenda" strategy, I answered proudly that I'm in the storage industry. The doctor responded excitedly that he was looking to move and needed to find cheap "storage" for his furniture during the transition. He asked for my business card.

The reality is that even in IT, storage is often an after-thought. The two things I hear from people that are not deep into this stuff are: (1) storage is so cheap and (2) we have TONS of storage. Storage, storage everywhere but not a spindle to use.

Unfortunately, in on-premise email archiving deployments, storage often ends up becoming an after-thought as well. Customers purchase email archiving solutions (whether SaaS or on-premise) for the mailbox management, E-Discovery, compliance and other benefits. Given that, in most cases, the team responsible for email and/or legal drives the decision. Buying a new, energy-hogging storage cabinet to keep the office warm is the last thing on their minds.

I can't count the number of visits I've had where the customer gets to the realization that they are going to be creating tons of data and need a place to store it. If they're lucky, they bring their "storage expert" into the room who often hasn't been informed about the project at all. In most cases, for small-to-mid-sized businesses, there is no such role, so they have to learn as they go.

Some of the challenges I've seen customers, particularly ones with limited IT staff run into:

"We have extra space on the SAN." In most IT departments, there is some extra storage "somewhere." Many small-to-mid-sized on-premise email archiving deployments often start by leveraging the available storage in-house. Unfortunately, most organizations quickly realize that archives keep growing and often very rapidly overwhelm available internal storage. In addition, as you'll see below, archive storage needs to be very finely-tuned and nine-times-out-of-ten, what the customer has in-house won't work for the archive.

"How much storage do I need?" Sounds like an easy question. I guess you can ask the storage hardware vendor and let him or her tell you, but that seems like letting the fox guard the hen-house. In reality, the answer is "a lot" and "more every day." Most on-premise vendors have tools and white papers - in many cases, ones that involve 50-100 pages of reading - to answer the question precisely. Obviously you need to assess your mail volume, message size, retention period and other factors. The sizing is surprisingly arduous and complex.

"It's an archive so I'll just use cheap disk." One of the basic principals of archiving is that old email will be accessed less frequently by users and therefore it can be stored on cheaper (lower-performance) storage. In geek-speak, this means things like using Serial-ATA drives for archival instead of Fibre-Channel for production email. Unfortunately, people take this to an extreme and often think the whole archive involves cheap storage. In reality, most archives have three pieces of data: (1) archived emails themselves, often written as files, (2) high-level metadata stored in some kind of relational or XML database and (3) search indices. The archived email indeed can be stored on relatively-cheap storage (though see below for more on this). But the database metadata needs to be stored on high-speed disk, like any database. Furthermore, the search indices are often even more temperamental about disk I/O times. As a rule of thumb, the database and index data can end up being 10% - 50% or more of the original content size. So you end up needing to buy a significant amount of significantly-expensive disk. :)

"This #!@# archive is slow!" Despite the best of software engineering in on-premise products, they are dependant on storage hardware and its proper configuration. Usually you only figure this out when you have a huge E-Discovery or compliance request and need to search through and export thousands or even millions of email messages. The searches can be slow due to poor performance or misconfiguration of the area where indices are stored. But the actual bulk export of messages itself can be a nightmare if the storage isn't configured correctly. Indeed, this mass export use case is why you can't just use cheap disk for archival without thinking it through at all. And of course, this all happens when you've got a lawyer camped out in your office waiting for the data.

"How do I move all of this data?" This one is perhaps the scariest of all. The math is simple. Storage arrays last 3-5 years. Archived data is often retained for 5-10 years or longer. So now you have this array with 100s of GBs or TBs of data. How do you migrate it all to a new array? How do you preserve compliance in the process? And make sure it all works? And how long will it take? This migration problem is a ticking time bomb for many customers and there is no easy answer.

Obviously with Software-as-a-Service, storage is still complex, but the customer doesn't deal with it, we do. And for whatever strange reason, I find storage fun. I've got issues... :)

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and innovation

Nick Mehta — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:10:00 GMT

As a longtime NFL fan, I've gotten used to the perennial ritual of sports writers identifying "seminal" changes that are "redefining the game of football." Some of these analyses pass the test of time and turn out to be legitimate evolutionary points in the game (e.g., the "era of the passing game" with QB-friendly rules and refs). Others are eventually called out for what they truly are - cool new phrases to describe things that have been happening for some time (the term "post-free-agency era" comes to mind; geez - that happened in 1989 so we're pretty squarely in the era!)

Now enter the IT industry, where buzzwords flutter around faster than the West Coast offense. Customers (and vendors sometimes) ask: which trends are real? And which ones are simply the result of marketing teams desperately relabeling old ideas to make new headlines.

With that in mind, I'm enjoying taking a critical eye to what's truly different about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Having been in the tech world for a while, I entered LiveOffice with a healthy skepticism over how much is unique about SaaS. After all, the 101 highway in Silicon Valley near my house was littered in 1999 with ASPs, MSPs and ISPs before they all went RIP. And the idea of running centralized servers and delivering service over data lines is kind of the Internet in general, no?

Yes and no. I'm going to write a few posts over the coming months on some of the truly unique aspects of what I'm seeing, as a recovering "licensed software guy" reformed to this new world.

As anyone who has run an on site software product team in the past can attest, what always kills you is when you realize how much of your resources go to things that don't help the customer's business problem for which they are talking to you in the first place. Obviously it's a trade off. On site software provides great value and can be tightly integrated into your network. But I'm now learning some of the challenges in terms of providing innovation for customers:

Compatibility. One of the biggest issues any on site vendor has to deal with in terms of development and testing is managing the huge matrix of possible systems in the customer environment with which the vendor's product may have to integrate. In the archiving world this often means [# of Server OS versions] * [# of Client OS versions] * [# of Email Server versions] * [# of Email Client versions] * [# of Storage versions] * [# of Database versions] * ... You'd be amazed how much time this testing and development takes - especially when you consider how many service packs of Windows, security patches for storage arrays, and database versions, etc. there are out there. Obviously a SaaS vendor has one internal environment against which to test. This simplifies development and testing dramatically.
Management Tools. Over time, as an on-site vendor, you need to invest not only in customer-facing functionality but also into tools to help the customer manage your technology. These tools are very important to the IT user of the product and are critical for solution success. However, at the end of the day, they don't help the business get incremental value - they simply help deliver on the core value of what they already purchased. In contrast, a SaaS vendor only has to build management tools for its own operations team (for the most part), which means significantly-less effort.
Instant Upgrades. One of things that always blew me away as an on site vendor was how long it would take for a customer to get the new functionality that we built. We'd ship a new release and it would take 1 year+ in many cases for customers to (a) find out about the new functionality, (b) get the software, (c) plan the required hardware changes and upgrade schedule, (d) test the changes and (e) upgrade. In contrast, when a SaaS vendor upgrades, its customers are generally on the latest version right away. This can often mean 1 year+ difference in the "time to new functionality" for a customer.
Legacy Version Support. When an on site product vendor identifies a bug or issue, it often has to fix it in many different releases at once. Because of the pain of upgrades, many customers ask vendors to support products for several years after they are released. Hence, vendors often have many "supported" versions out in the field. This is good for the customer on paper but means the vendor needs to recode each bug fix in several "code trees" in parallel. Again, this takes away from the innovation the vendor can provide. Obviously, a SaaS vendor can instantly deliver a fix for all customers with one code change.

What does this all mean? Well, all of the above "non-innovation" development work adds up. From experience, "keeping the lights on" tasks can consume 80% of R&D resources in a mature organization. No matter how many people you have in your team, that's a lot of lost functionality.

As I said upfront, Software-as-a-Service is a trade-off and not panacea. But one of the big benefits you get, for customers that are able and willing to receive services rather than on site software, is that the vendor can spend more time innovating for the customer and less time maintaining.

I'll continue this theme on what's different about SaaS in future posts. I welcome your feedback.

New season

Nick Mehta — Thu, 15 May 2008 03:30:00 GMT

I love football (and my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers), as anyone who knows me at all gets to know very (sometimes nauseatingly) well. The glories of the game have been documented many times over. But one of my favorite aspects of football is the blank slate and eternal optimism that accompanies the new season for every team.

I kind of feel that way about the new jobs that we take periodically in our careers. There is nothing like the feeling of walking into a company and realizing how much unknown excitement lies ahead of you.

On that note and as you may have heard, I recently (Monday) joined LiveOffice as CEO. Needless to say, I'm fired up.

Almost five years ago, I had the fortune of being pulled into the messaging industry when VERITAS Software (now Symantec) bought KVS and I was offered the opportunity to get involved with the business. The archiving product (Enterprise Vault) ended up doing very well and I was honored to have been a part of it. And for some unknown reason, I just completely fell in love with the email and messaging industry, as well as with the amazing product and team we built specifically.

Because of this, when I left Symantec in October 2007, the good folks at LiveOffice asked me to join the Board of Directors last fall. I thought it would be a fun opportunity for me to learn about the Software-As-A-Service industry that I had heard so much about from the likes of salesforce.com and to help the company in any way I can based upon my archiving experience, while I pursued my own personal dream of finding a company to join and run.

Over the past several months, I learned more and more about the LiveOffice business and company and fell head-over-heels in love again. There were three aspects of LiveOffice, in particular, that really caught my eye.

1. Sector

As I said, I am fascinated by the importance of email in our world. So many smarter people than me have written about the importance of email to businesses that it's become a cliche. Companies increasingly understand the needs to manage, archive, retain, discover and secure email effectively and are recognizing the overload employees are personally dealing with around email.

But what always struck me about email was the emotional impact it has on us: the unreturned email and the hurt feelings it can create, when the person may have just lost the message in the inbox; the "high" people get when they check their email and the addiction that this implies; the thrill of cleaning up your inbox, despite the inevitable futility of the effort.

When I left Symantec, I really wanted to start or find a business in the messaging industry with which to get involved. I looked at various startups and was intrigued with the new approaches to email productivity like what the guys at Xobni were doing. I was equally impressed with what Microsoft and Google were planning themselves to advance the industry. I knew that if I could find something in the messaging world, I will have found the next season of my career.

What really intrigued me about LiveOffice was that the needs we solve are well-understood (messaging, archiving, compliance, discovery, etc.) and that the method of delivery of the software ("-As-A-Service") was what was unique. Having been involved in in-house software for many years, I saw the great things that could be done by balancing innovation, timeliness and quality for customers. But I also saw the challenges customers faced with even the best of products if they didn't have the in-house IT staff, capital, expertise and tolerance for risk necessary to plan, provision, deploy, operate, troubleshoot and scale these systems.

Put more simply, it felt to me like messaging and message archiving are universal needs and yet not every organization was equipped to run these systems themselves.

In general, I'm a big believer that more-usable and transparent technology (which you see in SaaS, open source and appliances) is the future of IT, and this felt like a good way to mix my passion and experience while learning something new.

2. Scale

At the same time, what I love about my work is leading teams. I enjoy all of the minutia, melodrama and mania of managing people and growing organizations. I looked at starting something from scratch, but in some sense, I was thinking about that as a means to an end of running a real company. I get the biggest high out of working with people, getting them on the same page, helping them to find their professional dreams, as cheesy as it may sound, and in the process, creating an organization of positive energy, prioritization and passion. All of this matters a lot more when you have 10 or 100 people versus 1. :)

In this respect, LiveOffice's stage as a profitable company with around 100 employees was very attractive to me. There was a great base of technology and team to build on, with demonstrated history of substantial revenue, growth and customer loyalty (99% client retention rate). At the same time, there was a great deal of fun work ahead to scale it to the next level.

But even more importantly, what I found amazing about LiveOffice was how it was built. I'm from Silicon Valley and am used to the excitement and craziness typical with "venture-backed startups." Raising money and "getting VC funding" is often the first priority for any entrepreneur.

In contrast, the founders Alex Rusich and Matt Smith built LiveOffice on nothing but the sweat of the team, some money from friends and family and a few credit cards here and there. :) I'm a firm believer that a business built in this way has more staying power because of the fundamentals and loyalty that all of that hard work creates. And I was excited to learn from Alex and Matt in this regard.

3. Style

Most importantly, work is very personal for me. I work because of the feeling I get from the team around me. So the "cultural fit" (to use another cliche) is the most critical factor for me.

Having been on the board, I was lucky to have gotten a chance to know Alex, Matt and many of the employees of the company. This is truly a remarkable and unique organization in terms of the loyalty and history that all of the employees have demonstrated. I really think of the greatest of jobs as feeling like family (which is how things felt for me with my team at Symantec) and it felt like this family was one in which I'd be honored to be adopted.

Needless to say, when Alex and Matt got to know me and asked me if I'd ever consider joining the company, even though they weren't looking for a CEO, it became the opportunity of a lifetime and a total no-brainer for me. I kind of feel like new Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin in this regard. :)

I look forward to sharing more of my thoughts on the company, messaging, SaaS and perhaps some football in the coming months. Thanks for reading this.