Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

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!

LiveOffice named to Deloitte Technology Fast 500

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

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:

1. A Total Cost of Ownership calculatorto show customers how much they can save moving to a SaaS email archiving solution. 
2. 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. :)
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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.
6. 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

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.