Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and migrations

TheRegister reported that 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?

I've written previously about 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!