Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and migrations

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?

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

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."