Posted by Nick Mehta on Tue, Apr 28, 2009 @ 09:43 PM
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.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Wed, Apr 15, 2009 @ 11:18 PM
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.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Sat, Apr 11, 2009 @ 09:38 AM
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.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Sat, Apr 11, 2009 @ 09:28 AM
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.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Mon, Apr 06, 2009 @ 07:37 PM
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.
Posted by Nick Mehta on Sat, Apr 04, 2009 @ 09:29 AM
"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."