Just as with all DEMO conferences, this year’s DEMOfall in San Diego consisted of a series of six-minute pitches — 67 across two days. Here’s a selection, focusing on messaging and collaboration companies. Each comes complete with a link to a video of the vendor’s six-minute pitch:

• System One — Automatically builds Wikis. Searches local files and the Web for content and then supports collaboration.
• ThinkFree — Web-based office suite. Compatibility with Microsoft Office. Documents reside on ThinkFree’s servers.
• Genius.com — Lets salespeople chase prospects across e-mail, Web sites, and live online chats. Web analytics focused on sales prospects.
• Koral — Content management and collaboration system. Lets information be automatically uploaded, indexed, and tagged, then supports searching documents based on both relevance and popularity.
• MindTouch — DekiBox appliance. A Wiki builder in a box that searches for corporate knowledge stored in e-mail.
• Serebrum — Axon, another Wiki builder. Trying to break out of the document paradigm.

There’s more in a separate bulletin, available to Ferris Research premium newsletter subscribers.

… Richi Jennings, with thanks to Computerworld for help with the summaries

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DEMOfall Showcased Interesting Messaging/Collaboration Start-ups (part 2)

There is a lot of expense in setting up and provisioning a solid Exchange hosting operation. For example, redundancy is required throughout to achieve the levels of uptime needed for such a service. This includes failover servers, backup power sources, and high-speed Internet connectivity from multiple providers.

The emergence of private label hosted Exchange services provides an opportunity to enter the market with little up-front cost. Such companies allow you to brand their offering as if it were your own. The service is priced in such a way that reseller margins of 50% can be achieved.

groupSPARK appears to have a strong offering and is one of the early movers in this field. Due to the flexibility of branding allowed, the service is to all intents and purposes invisible to the end user. The offering is designed to be attractive to channels that already have a network of SMB customers. A move to provide branded automated billing will further strengthen the offering.

… John Stanners

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Email Archiving Architectures Are Evolving

Voltage Security is becoming known for its easy-to-use encryption software, which bases the key management on a user’s identity — typically, the user’s email address. This has many advantages over traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) solutions, as we pointed out in a recent report. Now, there’s a new kid on the Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) block — Identum.

Identum’s architecture is different from Voltage’s in several notable respects:

1. Where the keys are issued — Identum has a centralized architecture; Voltage’s is federated.
2. When the keys are issued — Identum’s scheme has the clients prefetch keys each month; Voltage’s has the clients recalculate the keys.
3. Simplicity — Key generation is essentially outsourced to Identum as a service; Voltage customers each run their own server.
4. Security — Identum arguably provides better security, at the expense of a reduction in control.
5. Performance — According to an academic paper, Identum’s encryption/decryption performance is significantly better than Voltage’s.

We describe this in more detail in a new report, just issued.

It’s good for both vendors that there are now two IBE players. It validates the market and provides additional impetus for each of them to innovate. We project that the email encryption market will be worth $1.5 billion per year in five years’ time.

… Richi Jennings

Writely is a Web-based word processor, now owned by Google. It is easy to use, with a good range of word processing features. If you think of it as a straight replacement for Word, it is unexciting. Features are not so broad, and it relies on a fast Internet connection. Two other applications are much more interesting, however.

There is often a need for individuals to maintain small parts of a Web site. Tools such as Macromedia Contribute target this function. Writely is ideal for this, and free. Its editing functions are familiar, and it is very easy to use for this task.

It is also ideally suited for handling documents that are primarily accessed from the Web and edited by more than one person (without a single central editor who reviews all changes). This is a quite common class of document. The Web-centric setup makes it easy for individuals (who can have different desktop platforms) to make changes to documents and work with other formats (in particular Word, OpenOffice, and PDF).

Tools following this model will become widely used.

… Steve Kille

In a recently publicized case, Quinby v. WestLB, court filings reveal that 180 magnetic backup tapes were searched and produced over 650,000 pages of evidence. The discovery costs totaled more than $480,000, not including the cost of diverting IT personnel to collect tapes and live email. Plus there was the additional cost of 10 to 12 lawyers at $200,000 to $300,000 per month to analyze and review data.

Ask yourself:

1. Are you prepared to search electronically stored information?
2. Can you identify the source and location of all electronic records in your company, including data that exists on magnetic tape?
3. Does your company have electronic records retention and disposition policies in place?
4. Are they enforced?

Don’t wait for a lawsuit to happen. The time to begin preparing for electronic discovery is now.

… Bob Spurzem