In an earlier post to this Blog, my colleague David Via opined that recent announcements by AOL, etc. of the federation of various Instant Messaging and Presence services and offerings reflected a failure of Instant Messaging and Presence standards. I disagree.

I have written a longer piece entitled  "An Introduction to Presence Models and Standards" for the Ferris Analyzer Service. This will be published  in the next couple of weeks.

I will merely summarize some of its content here.

Nick Shelness - Senior Analyst

Continue reading ‘For Instant Messaging and Presence Services Federation and Standards are Complementary’

Vendor Name: Veritas
Date of This Document: March 15, 2005
Authors: David Ferris, David Via
Source of Information: Andrew Barnes, Vault Marketing Manager; Jeff Hausman, Product Marketing Director
Quick Summary of Firm’s Offerings. Veritas sells storage and infrastructure software products and services

Company Statistics

· # Full-Time Staff: Veritas has 6,500 employees. In September 2004, 200 people world-wide were employed in the Vault business.
· Stock Market Status: Public, VRTS
· # Live Paying Customer Seats: Veritas says that as of 1/1/2005, there were about 1,100 active customers, with a total of 2.4 million mailbox licenses sold.

Enterprise Vault v6

Product Name: Enterprise Vault
Product Functionality:
· Archiving of unstructured content, for Exchange, Notes/Domino (new with V6), SMTP (new with V6), file system, SharePoint, other applications through SDK
· Email journaling. This is where a copy is stored of all email, irrespective of whether the user and/or administrative policy indicates a copy should be made.
· eDiscovery for litigation and compliance purposes
Major Benefits:
· Staff supervision, to ensure regulations and/or policy compliance
· Centralized information store for corporate exploitation
· PST elimination
· Much easier upgrades from Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003
· Email server storage optimization
Platforms: Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003, SPS 2003, Windows and CIFS file systems, SMTP, Lotus Domino 6
Competition: The main competitors are EMC Legato, Zantaz EAS, and Opentext (IXOS). Beyond these, many other vendors compete.
Main Features of New Version 6:
· Extended categorization. Allows the categorization taxonomy for messages to be defined dynamically via XML rules. This capability can share a common set of criteria together with archive filtering (see below.) It also establishes an interface to integrate with document and record management systems
· Automated PST discovery (process searches network for PST files, inspects registry entries, identifies owner, schedules migration, monitors and audits the migration)
· Support for additional sources of archived content, including SMTP, Lotus Domino mail, and SharePoint 2003.
· SDK. API access now includes control of storage, search, migration, and other services.
· Hosting. Customers can now use a single copy of the software to support multiple clients. This is useful for service providers and certain large organizations servicing departmental groups.
· Archive filtering. Similar to extended categorization, this allows dynamic inspection of messages applying conditions specified in XML rules
· Veritas NetBackup integration. Historically Vault was disk oriented. Through integration with NetBackup Media Manager, other media are now supported, such as tape, CD, DVD, optical drives.
· Improved administration with centralized policy administration for multiple archiving types (eg, Exchange, SharePoint, files), enhanced system logging features, and a plug in for Microsoft Operations Manager.
· Expanded storage options with support for IBM DR550, and improved EMC2 Centera support for privileged delete and retention classes.
Release Date. V6 launched on April 26, 2004, available in Summer 2005
Pricing: Traditionally the firm charges per seat, for active users. There are extra charges for additional modules such as compliance management and maintenance. For one Enterprise Vault server with 10,000 users for mailbox archiving, the list price is $177,000. Beyond the negotiating skill of the customer, the price also varies according to whether one purchases directly, or through channels, notably systems integrators.
Main Plans--Next 12 Months:
· Improved integration with Veritas’s backup solutions
· Mailbox archiving for Lotus and SMTP
· Discovery filtering output will be fed into records management systems.
· Ingestion of historical backups
Vendor’s Perception of its Top 5 Competitive Strengths:
· Flexible, scalable architecture
· Platform approach supporting multiple email and non email sources (SharePoint, file Systems)
· Advanced PST migration capability
· Non-intrusive end-user operation including off line vault
· Strong customer reference base
For Further Information. http://www.veritas.com/kvs

Ferris Research Comments

· Long-term, email archiving solutions will be folded into a more general-purpose archiving technology, that of document management.
· Veritas makes a lot of use of come-with-us-and-save-money arguments. These valid arguments are based on the lower hardware and support costs, the ability to conduct proper backups, and the ability to monitor and enforce compliance, when PSTs are no longer necessary. The support costs of PSTs are high.
· PSTs are costly to support. They also create islands of data that cannot be accessed centrally. Veritas has developed the capability to automatically discover and bulk import these .PSTs into the central archive. This is very valuable. It saves organizations time and money in achieving regulatory compliance and safe-guarding user data.
· Veritas endeavors to be an expert on technology, not on industry regulations and policies. It teams with third party systems integrators that do have the necessary industry-specific knowledge, such as EDS, Fujitsu, HP, BT, and WM-Data.
· Some major storage vendors, notably EMC2, IBM, and NetApp, help stimulate sales of Vault. Archiving applications help sell a lot of hardware.
· Veritas also partners with application vendors, including Microsoft, Hummingbird, MDY, Facetime, IM Logic and Interwoven.

How can legitimate direct marketers get their messages through more reliably? How can they avoid being branded as a "spammer" by over-enthusiastic spam vigilanties?

We wrote about this problem before. See [1] and [2]. This is the third of an irregular series of blog posts where we’ll examine some additional ideas. the previous posts in the series are here: [3] [4].

Continue reading ‘How not to be a spammer [5]: Tell me why I got this’

We went to LinuxWorld Canada earlier this week, held in Toronto. An interesting event, although not quite as busy as the recent US conference in Boston.

Continue reading ‘LinuxWorld Canada: A Messaging Perspective’

Earlier this month, Sprint announced a new messaging archiving service aimed (like most archiving solutions) at helping organizations with compliance.  Other players in this archiving as a service space include Fortiva, Iron Mountain and Zantaz.  Implementing archiving for compliance can be a costly and time consuming process for organizations, so in many ways a service-based approach makes sense.  "Subscribe today and start archiving tomorrow", so to speak.

This segment raises two related questions in my mind.  First. do archiving services as a stand-alone solution have a long-term future? And second, if a service provider approach makes sense for archiving, why stop there?

Continue reading ‘On archiving as a service and what messaging ASPs must to do be competitive’