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.