Ferris Research is close to completion of a white paper and webcast on how long electronic material should be kept until it’s deleted. The project will generate significant interest:

• This is the first time the overall electronic retention landscape has been presented. Other work on electronic retention limits itself, narrowly, to email
• It provides very valuable advice on how to decide and implement retention policy. Actionable advice isn’t available elsewhere
• It provides a clear vision of how electronic retention will be done in ten years time. They are invaluable for IT strategic planning

The table of contents and executive summary can be seen here. The final white paper will be published on September 29, on the same day that we’ll hold the webcast.

An inexpensive sponsorship program, starting at $2,495, is available to vendors: see here for details. This is a great marketing opportunity:

• Electronic retention is a complex and hot topic, confusion abounds
• The content of the paper and webcast are important
• The content of the paper and webcast help your prospects decide what to do about retention. That speeds sales, and deployment, and thus revenues
• The paper and webcast will be widely disseminated and discussed, because of their importance. You will want to have your name and logo on it. You won’t want to have your competitors’ names and logos there and be missed out
• Sponsor PR staff will be promoting the white paper and webcast heavily. The material is a good opportunity for you to be seen as a thought leader
• The material can be used for lead generation programs

For further information, or a copy of the full draft white paper, contact David Ferris at +1 415 367 3436, or david.ferris@ferris.com.

Just over a year ago we wrote about Google’s big splash around Google Wave. One of the things we pointed out at the time was Wave’s suitability for third-party developers to write applications to take advantage of this platform. In order for a large vendor to be successful at introducing a new development platform – such as Google Wave – a substantial partner ecosystem needs to be developed and nurtured to adopt the new platform. Good technology alone is never sufficient to ensure success in the marketplace.

As our friend Dana Blankenhorn has alluded, simply going it alone, tossing great technology out there, and hoping that the market will converge around any given technology is no replacement for a solid business model. At least Google had the good sense to recognize the problem and do something about it. That takes guts.

Google Wave was cool. But in business there’s more to surfing than simply finding a cool wave.

…David Sengupta. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is chief architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

Yet, according to RIM, “the BlackBerry enterprise solution was designed to preclude RIM–or any third party–from reading encrypted information under any circumstances since RIM does not store or have access to the encrypted data” (source: ZDNet). Thus, blocking governments’ ability to tap into RIM communications is by design.

Isn’t it interesting that many of the countries threatening to ban the BlackBerry are some of the worst proponents of Internet censorship? RIM President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis got it right when he stated to the WSJ: “If they can’t deal with the Internet, they should shut it off.” Technologies such as BlackBerry, Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet itself are all just tools that can be used for good or evil. Being able to communicate securely can provide great benefits for democracy, as seen in Iran during the uprisings last year following the election. Terrorists can, of course, also use these technologies for evil.

RIM has done a great job providing a solid infrastructure that is used by millions around the globe for reliable and secure communications. RIM services have withstood large-scale power outages, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous other natural disasters. Kudos to RIM for standing in the face of opposition. Our hope is that RIM will not back down and enable back doors for surveillance such as those found in Skype clients distributed in China.

Just because the BlackBerry can be a tool for evil does not mean that its effectiveness should be compromised for the rest of the world. If some governments can’t live with that, they should go ahead with their bans.

…David Sengupta. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is chief architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

Broadly, IMAP in Outlook 2010 works reasonably, and performance against IMAP accounts feels slightly better than Outlook 2007. However, we have observed client hangs (needing product restart) and slowness interacting with IMAP servers.

The improvements to deletion, by moving messages to a “trash” folder on the server, are good. This deletion also works cleanly with Outlook rules set up to delete selected messages as they arrive.

The async download of messages is a good thing. It is a pity that they don’t also download the message structure so that the user can select attachments to download, which would be helpful with large attachments on a slow link. It is disconcerting to see a message start off without an attachment and then have the attachment appear later. There is a bug with calendar items, whereby you can only see the message as a calendar item the second time it is opened (after the attachment is downloaded).

For IMAP users, there seems to be a regression in using TNEF (the Microsoft internal format, that non-Exchange users see as “winmail.dat” attachments) rather than MIME, and it does not appear possible to suppress this for message forwarding as attachment and at some other times.

For use in a mobile environment, where links are not always as fast as they should be, it is a pity that Outlook is not making more use of advanced IMAP and LEMONADE features to improve the user experience.

IMAP support in Outlook 2010 has improved, but Microsoft could do very much more.

…Steve Kille. Steve is a periodic contributor to Ferris Research. He is also CEO of Isode, a messaging and directory server software vendor.

The technology has taken a lot of battering over the last 10 years. First it was bought out for $1 billion by Baltimore Technologies. We are not normally given to hyperbole, but in this case will make an exception. YES, AN INCREDIBLE $1 BILLION!!! This was at the height of the dot.com boom in 2000. The acquisition and its price made no real sense, but the price was naturally irresistible for the selling stockholders. The Baltimore merger was a great distraction.

In 2002 the technology was bought by NET-TEL, an X.400-based messaging firm, for a suitably post-crunch sum vastly less than $1 billion. The MIMEsweeper part of NET-TEL’s business was by far the most important, but the new owners took a long time to get fully behind their acquisition. That did further damage. Along the way, NET-TEL renamed itself Clearswift.

For the last three years, Clearswift has been focusing hard on its core MIMEsweeper business. Despite the numerous distractions of the last decade, many MIMEsweeper customers have stayed in the fold, so there’s been a reliable revenue stream. MIMEsweeper and Clearswift’s new Web and Email Gateway products are quite sticky, because of investment customers make in their custom-policy definitions. The main message we hear now from Clearswift is: “Content inspection is our core business and we’re 100% committed to it.”

Product line summary:

• Scans Web and email data streams
• Scans for spam, viruses, spyware, other malware
• Powerful and highly recursive policy definition language (mainly boolean logic plus regular expression matching) used, among other things, for compliance and data loss prevention
• Policy-based encryption, either through strong encryption or by standard password-based ZIP files
• Plenty of compliance filters provided
• Policy management system works across both Web and email channels

The technology is sold into organizations of all sizes, including very large ones. Nevertheless, its greatest success is with medium-size organizations, with 100 to 3,000 employees. As you’d expect, the company sells a lot through value-added channels, and has invested significantly to build out its channel and support programs.

Clearswift doesn’t disclose its revenues. Ferris Research estimates these at $40 million annually. A series of venture fundings allowed Clearswift to invest ahead of revenues for an extended period. We’re glad to learn that the company was profitable for the second half of the last fiscal year and plans to be fully profitable this year.

… David Ferris

• COMPRESS (4978)
• ESEARCH (4731)
• CHUNKING (3030)
• 8BITMIME (1652)
• ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES (3463)
• BINARYMIME (3030)
• CONDSTORE (4551)

These standards are also supported by Apple’s Mobile Me email service.

We have previously argued that mobile email will drive adoption of new IMAP standards, and in particular those defined in the LEMONADE Profile, described in Isode’s white paper, “LEMONADE Profile: The Key Standard for Mobile Messaging.”

This change has certainly not come as a revolution, but these developments in the iPhone suggest that these changes are coming gradually as an evolution and improvement. Support for two of these standards (both edited by Isode engineers) is of particular interest:

• CONDSTORE (described in the white paper) is a complex specification that is key to fast reconnect, which we have not seen supported in an email client designed for a mobile device until now. Thunderbird 3 supports CONDSTORE.
• ESEARCH (extended search) allows a client to efficiently search very large mailboxes. This is included in the second LEMONADE Profile, RFC 5550, and is not described in the white paper.

Since the LEMONADE work started, typical network bandwidth has increased significantly and so it is much easier to work without these extensions. However, use of these capabilities will improve performance for the end user, and differentiate iPhone email performance. LEMONADE capabilities will give a faster user experience, and will also reduce network traffic, which will improve battery performance and may reduce network usage charges.

We hope that this is the start of a trend for improved IMAP support in other email clients and mobile devices.

…Steve Kille. Steve is a periodic contributor to Ferris Research. He is also CEO of Isode, a messaging and directory server software vendor.

Exchange Server Archive V3 continues its tradition of easy installation and simple operation. End users will like the Outlook interface, which displays archived email and attachments in their native format. Admins will like the easy-to-use setup, archive policy manager, and PST archiving tool. You can view product screen shots here.

Red Gate is targeting the small to midsize enterprise market (50-1,000 mailboxes) and pricing is very reasonable. For example, the price for 250 mailboxes according to the online pricing calculator is $5,597.50 plus support and maintenance.

Red Gate is perhaps a name you have not heard of in the crowded email archiving market, but we like the look of its technology and the overall product seems very well thought out. We recommend you take a look if you are in the market for email archiving. A free 30-day trial, with full technical support, is available as a download from the Web site, as well as online demos and webinars.

… Bob Spurzem - In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid-based disk storage system.

• According to Kurt Jensen, CEO of Daegis, revenues for calendar years 2007/8/9 were approximately $16M, $21M, and $23M, respectively, with profitability consistently between 25% and 35%.
• Unify paid some $37M for Daegis. Of this, $24M is paid cash (debt financing from Hercules Technology Growth Capital). The balance is in Unify stock.
• This is a price/TTM revenue ratio of around 1.5. This strikes us as a remarkably low price. Todd Wille, Unify CEO, comments that “Daegis is receiving a significant portion of the proceeds in Unify stock which is perceived to be undervalued and represents tremendous upside to the sellers.” All the same, the ratio should please Unify shareholders.
• Corporate legal departments want to bring as much of the e-discovery work in-house as they can, because of the high costs of outsourcing this work. There is thus intense pressure on review firms to reduce their charges. Generally, expect plenty of case management firms to be acquired over the next couple of years.
• The strong profitability reported by Daegis is all the more striking given the price pressure. Partly this is because most of Daegis’ software is home brewed, not licensed. Daegis believes additional factors are the breadth of the e-discovery processes that its software encompasses, and the provision of high-margin professional services.
• In principle, Unify gains substantially by the merger:
  • Gets a position in the legal world, and the ability to market to the legal world.
  • Can get an interesting competitive edge by tightly integrating case management information and archiving. Such integration is hard and could end in tears.
  • It helps corporate legal departments bring more e-discovery work in-house.

… David Ferris

• Daegis has a matter review SaaS that culls down a corpus of ESI. It also provides manpower to plan the initial collection process and the actual review/culling.
• Unify’s AXS-One archiving software will be integrated tightly with Daegis’ DocHunter eDiscovery system.
• Unify’s archiving and e-discovery group will adopt the Daegis name.

Today, ESI archives are wholly separate from e-discovery systems. Data is extracted from the archive and put into an e-discovery system. Thus, the following types of information are normally not included in the archive:

• How valuable the material is for e-discovery.
• Who has reviewed the material.
• Who is the custodian of the material.
• Cases that have used the material.

In a novel step, Unify/Daegis plans to change all this. The archive will be enhanced so that it now contains e-discovery information.

Comments:

• Unify will now be able to offer technology plus a proven professional services team that produces relevant e-discovery material, all in one organization. That’s a significant differentiator in the archiving world.
• Unify will also be able to let general counsel bring much of the e-discovery work in-house. This would be extremely attractive to many organizations, due to the significant cost of outsourcing this work.
• The idea of building case management data into an archive is very interesting. E-discovery is now the major driver for archiving purchases, and e-discovery is very expensive. Adding case management information to the archive should, in principle, translate to substantially better searches, and substantial reductions in legal costs.
• On the other hand, e-discovery is simply one application of an archive. You could argue that an archive should be more application-independent.
• It makes sense to use the Daegis name. Daegis is known in the legal world, and e-discovery is a major driver for archiving; Unify’s name is only known in the database tools world.
• Integrating the AXS-One and Daegis code sets and data structures will be challenging, all the more so because Daegis’ system is hosted, while Unify’s software resides on the customer’s premises. Many organizations fail at such integration. The roadmap should be viewed with appropriate caution.
• Daegis staff have a lot of experience extracting material from archiving solutions. However, they have relatively little experience with AXS-One archiving. That may be a problem.
• It’s good to see Unify investing further in its AXS-One acquisition.

… David Ferris

Hitherto, email archiving has been at the fore, with file archiving always on the back burner. The general thinking on file archiving was to just add more disk capacity.

The new emphasis on file archiving is driven by the total cost of disk storage. Disk hardware may be cheap, but the real cost is in disk management. Daily backup and provisioning can consume 50% of an administrator’s total time. Simply adding more disk capacity is too expensive.

The proper solution is to consider a true storage tier that is optimized for cost-effective, long-term storage. New storage solutions are being announced by all the leading storage vendors that include not only high-capacity SATA disk drives, but grid architectures for scalability without expensive provisioning, and object-based storage designs that are self-healing and do not require old-fashioned tape backup. And finally, data optimization (both compression and deduplication) is being introduced as a further means to optimize storage costs.

Archive storage will become a mainstream storage solution for all organizations by 2012.

… Bob Spurzem

• Do you presently have on-premise email archiving? If so, then you must consider how to move the email archiving storage to the cloud. The cost of this move can be considerable, in terms of load fees, disrupted user time, and support staff time.
• Do you plan to archive email in the cloud? If so, what archiving capabilities are offered by your cloud email provider? Will they meet your needs for e-discovery and mailbox management? What is the additional cost?
• Do you plan to postpone cloud email for two to three years, but begin email archiving now? If so, then consider how you will move potentially terabytes of email archives to the cloud later. You may wish to begin cloud archiving now to lessen the future impact.

They key factor to remember is the size of email archive storage. Even a couple years of email can be terabytes of storage. Moving terabytes of email storage from on-premise to the cloud is a formidable and costly task. Keep this important issue in mind as you consider the benefits of cloud email.

… Bob Spurzem

• A British UK property developer was working with a partner (Middle Eastern royalty).
• They wanted to develop a part of central London.
• The UK’s Prince of Wales objected to the development, and contacted the partner.
• There’s a nice email record of the interaction.
• As a result, the partner backed out.
• The partner deleted the email correspondence with the Prince of Wales, so it wouldn’t have to pay around $120 million in compensation to the developer.
• The partner then lied to the UK courts about its reason for backing out.

More here.

… David Ferris

That may be true, but there is a potential problem with this approach.

What happens when you have to upgrade Exchange sometime in the future? Take, for example, the recent upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. With this upgrade you had to physically migrate all mailbox content to the new server. It was a very time-consuming process, even for the much smaller mailboxes common with Exchange 2003. What happens if the same type of upgrade is required in a future version of Exchange, and mailboxes are 10GB in size (or larger)? The impact on upgrade will be huge.

This is something to consider if you are planning to greatly expand average mailbox size with Exchange 2010.

… Bob Spurzem, with many thanks to Martin Tuip, Exchange MVP, who raised this issue



• Support for EAS/Zantaz has become very poor since Autonomy acquired the product.
• It appears Autonomy has little interest in the product.
• However, an Exchange 2010 version is now available. The development efforts for this are nontrivial, so contrary to the prior bullet, that indicates Autonomy does have some interest in the product.
• Autonomy doesn’t provide product roadmaps, which makes it still harder to tell what’s happening with EAS/Zantaz.
• EAS/Zantaz is not strong in localization–notably searches that use non-English/American characters.
• It took Autonomy two years to make its Idol search work with EAS, but now it’s working well.
• Systems integrator Capex is hiring lots of people with EAS/Zantaz skills. Maybe they could purchase the product from Autonomy.

… David Ferris, with thanks to the contributor

Caveat: Embittered ex-employees probably form the vast bulk of contributors to sites of this nature, so the reliability of the data should be treated as highly questionable.

… David Ferris, with thanks to a financial analyst chum

• Stopping employees from disclosing sensitive information
• Protecting against hidden phishing/Trojan attacks
• Linking social network presences to the main corporate identity
• Monitoring, moderating, and controlling posts
• Controlling access to specific capabilities within a social network
• Logging of posts and interactions
• Feeding a corporate archive
• Reporting on employees’ social network use

Comments:

• FaceTime has good experience, acquired over the last 10 years, in monitoring and controlling instant messaging. Many of the challenges it faced there are being replicated in the social networking field, such as lack of standards and nonexistent or rudimentary APIs. That experience will help the firm as it extends its reach to social networking.
• FaceTime is providing the fullest support for the business market leaders, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Initially, the support for other social networks is much cruder, largely a matter of site blocking. That makes sense. At this early stage of social networking technology, providing high levels of control functionality is a laborious process for FaceTime.
• The similarity of the names “FaceTime” and “Facebook” must present some minor challenges to the company. (Hey, you expect such profound observations from we analyst heavyweights at Ferris Research!)

… David Ferris

I suggest:

• Compliance. Financial services is the leading industry. Recent FINRA regulations have specifically identified social networks. Governmental bodies and energy utilities will also be early adopters.
• Truth in advertising laws.
• The need to control corporate messages to the outside world.
• E-discovery.
• Information leak protection.

… David Ferris, with thanks to FaceTime’s Sarah Carter and Eric Young for their thoughtful discussions

• See various adverse comments at http://www.archiving101.com/?p=77. Caveats: 1) This Web site is run by Martin Tuip, who works for Iron Mountain/Mimosa, which competes with Autonomy. 2) The comments are spread over 2008 to 2010.
• A major Zantaz client comments that, for the EAS on-premises archiving product, support is awful, documentation inadequate, product direction unclear, IDOL integration is proving difficult, and account managers seem to have little influence inside Autonomy.
• Autonomy seems to be making excessive use of accounting sleight of hand to make its financials seem better than they are: See our recent bulletin, Autonomy Cooking Books?.

While certainly not a statistically reliable way of inferring troubles, but my sense is that things are amiss at Autonomy.

Does anyone else have thoughts? Please comment, or contact me at david.ferris@ferris.com or +1 (415) 367-3436. If you want anonymity, indicate that and we won’t reveal your identity.

… David Ferris

The biggest change is the move to split the Personal Archive mailbox into its own database. Now you can implement a tiered storage strategy, where active mailboxes are stored on high-performance SAS drives and the Personal Archive can be stored on lower-cost SATA drives. The advantage is that you can fine-tune the underlying storage to match the application. In the case of the active mailbox, performance is the key factor. For the Personal Archive mailbox, low-cost capacity is the primary factor. Both mailboxes are viewable side-by-side in Outlook so the user experience is seamless. Finally, Microsoft now supports the Archive Mailbox with Outlook 2007.

There are three important new features for e-discovery:

• Search preview. This allows you to review search statistics prior to completing the search. This a fancy feature, sometimes referred to as “early case assessment,” that is only available in standalone archiving and discovery applications.
• Search de-duplication. This feature duplicates from a search to reduce the result set.
• Search annotation. Using this feature, you can add tags to search results that can be searched later. Sample tags are strings such as “confidential,” “Case XYZ,” or “Privileged.” All three new features improve the performance and usability of the search function, possibly eliminating the need to purchase a stand-alone discovery application.

Microsoft is thinking through its development plans for archiving and discovery well. Being able to store email securely over the long term, and search it quickly for e-discovery purposes, has been a major pain for end users. It’s good to see Microsoft responding, step by step.

… Bob Spurzem – In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

• Archive emails for a user can be in a different mailbox than the primary mailbox. This improves performance and allows for multitiered storage.
• Tools let administrators import user PST files.

Various improvements relate to e-discovery: tools for retention policy tags, annotation of reviewed items, search result de-duplication, etc. These will help, but Exchange 2010 still lacks plenty of commonly required, more advanced features such as review workflows.

Outlook Web Application (OWA) is now asynchronous. This should make life much more pleasant for users, reducing the OWA “freezing.” OWA should deliver the same kind of performance enhancements that Outlook users saw when they moved from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003/2007 Cached Mode.

Finally, mobile users will appreciate the “conversation view” support in ActiveSync, and administrators will appreciate the management GUI getting closer in feature parity to Powershell.

… Ursheet Parikh – Ursheet is founder and CEO of StorSimple, which provides cloud-based storage. We’re delighted he made this contribution–many thanks Ursheet.

Today, we usually sift through electronic archives by doing word searches. But more is possible. In particular, networks can be built that yield much of value. Very early examples of commercial products that identify such networks are from Clearwell Systems and Attenex/FTI Consulting. These products are used for e-discovery, and investigate who’s been talking to whom about such-and-such subject.

Non-email methods of communicating digitally are flourishing, such as via computer-based voice, social networks, instant messaging, Twitter, SMS, and SharePoint. In each case, there’s great potential for technology that lets us see who communicates with whom, about what, and how they do so.

Academic Research

Exciting academic work has been done in this field over the last 25 years, mainly by mathematicians, computer scientists, and sociologists. A rich and specialized graph theory has developed, known as social network analysis. It’s accompanied by a useful (and unfamiliar) set of concepts. The work is far more sophisticated than is suggested by commercial offerings such as those of Clearwell and Attenex/FTI. For a summary of what’s happening, see here.

Over the next 25 years, I think this field will yield rich commercial benefits. And conversely, engagement with the commercial world will stimulate and lend focus to academic research. I suspect there will be many high-value practical applications, and that they’re hard to see right now. Practical applications that can be identified now include:

• Legal discovery
• Monitoring for criminal activities, or activities that are not in compliance with regulations
• Identifying subject matter experts
• Exploring market needs hypotheses
• CRM
• Identifying key influencers
• Generating a corporate map based on organizational connections, location, or job function

NodeXL

NodeXL is an interesting example of human-networking interpretation technology. It’s open source technology, very close to academia, but can be used commercially. It’s built in Excel, and can ingest content from various sources such as Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, as well as Outlook. A nice video tutorial is here.

For the moment, most organizations will want help using NodeXL. Marc Smith, one of the developers, offers corresponding professional services. See Connected Action Consulting.

… David Ferris, with thanks to Jeff Ubois and his Personal Archiving Conference, and Marc Smith

Comments:

• Astaro deserves more visibility.
• The main services of the appliance are:
  • Network security/firewall
  • Email security–AV, AS
  • Web security–content filtering, anti-malware, Skype, peer to peer, etc.
• Revenues around $50M annually, and the company is profitable.
• Astaro sells mainly to SMEs via resellers.

… David Ferris

• Access and publish emails and documents on SharePoint, without having to switch applications.
• Collaborate on documents using Sametime.
• Send document links rather than attachments, reducing email storage.
• Update document fields to comply with SharePoint taxonomy and governance requirements.
• Tap into the enterprise social network on SharePoint to collaborate with colleagues or find people (the beta will be available in Q2).
• Manage SharePoint team events from an integrated Lotus Notes calendar view.

Comments:

• Notes customers want to implement a shared workspace environment. In early 2008, it seemed the way to go was with Lotus’ Quickr offering.
• However, Microsoft SharePoint has become the mainstream shared workspace platform, so many Notes users prefer to use this instead of Quickr.

… David Ferris

In his inaugural blog, Perry talks about managing storage efficiently. Assuming Perry keeps his blog up, we expect this will become one of the top Exchange storage blogs.

David Sengupta ~ In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is chief architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

One reason is the Patriot Act.

This recent blog in ITbusinessedge reveals some chilling news about the Patriot Act. Did you know that the federal government can access anyone’s email without needing a court order? The law itself is a little vague in some parts and Congress is right now working on refinements to its application.

There is no certainty when the Patriot Act will be modified; in the meantime, it is wise for any organization to keep all of its email secure behind the company firewall.

Many thanks to Iron Mountain’s Bill Tolsen for raising this issue. For further discussion see his initial comments and comments on further legislation.

… Bob Spurzem. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

First, a couple of relevant bits of background information:

• Autonomy’s core business is its Idol enterprise search product. The search market in general has been somewhat stagnant for several years.
• Autonomy’s biggest competitor was FAST. FAST cooked its books and had major product issues. FAST was acquired by Microsoft. Autonomy’s other big competitor is the Google Search Appliance.
• Autonomy’s acquisitions in the archiving field–Zantaz and EAS–have suffered substantial vicissitudes. We don’t know the details, but acquired staff have often been very disillusioned, and more recently we’ve talked to major EAS clients who are very dissatisfied and are considering moving elsewhere.

The speculation is as follows:

• Autonomy is buying businesses to increase its revenues.
• It’s often reclassifying deferred income as current income. For example, if a sale is for three years of business, it’s taking the three years of revenue in the current year rather than spreading it over three years.
• Hence, in order to maintain attractive revenues and profitability, Autonomy is obliged to keep doing deals.
• Further, cooking the books in this way explains why the company has had a cash conversion ratio of some 75%.

Generally, the investment bank feels that Autonomy’s published financial information needs to be far more transparent.

Similar concerns are expressed by Dave Kellogg, CEO of an Autonomy competitor, in his Kellblog.

Can anyone provide further information? It seems things are seriously amiss at Autonomy. If you want to contribute without your identity being revealed, contact me at david.ferris@ferris.com, or (415) 367-3436.

… David Ferris, with thanks to the investment banker and software analyst Curt Monash

• Storage is getting cheaper and faster all the time.
• The costs of deletion are greater than keeping digital information.
• A (very) small proportion of old digital information will actually be of some value.
• It’s surprisingly hard to delete information.

For example, see our past bulletins, Expect to Archive Everything, and You, Dear Reader, Are Immortal.

On the other hand, preserving privacy is an excellent reason to delete information. For example, a bank might wish to retain confidential information on a customer only so long as is necessary, because otherwise that information might later leak out, for example via a disaffected employee.

Software analyst Curt Monash recently argued that rather than pass laws that require that information be deleted, laws should instead prohibit certain types of use of stored information:

• Vast amounts of sensitive information about us are being stored — our emails and instant messages, things we’ve purchased, adult Web sites we visit, files we share, cellphone locations, etc.
• The information is stored in very many different places, such as servers and local hard disks at work, on PCs at home, places in the cloud, memory sticks, etc.
• There’s not much that can be done about the existence of this information. It’s utterly out of control, even if we were to restrict the information concerned to that maintained by a single organization.
• Big Brother, unethical businesses, and other malevolent forces will be sorely tempted to seek out and misuse stored information in ways that intrude on people’s freedoms and privacy.
• The best way to handle this is not by requiring that the information be deleted–this is impractical. Instead, laws should be passed that prohibit stored information being used in particular ways.

To learn more about Curt’s views, see this short essay. He’s probably right. An invitation-only conference to explore the idea further will take place in October 2010, at Stanford University, California. Your current interlocutor is fortunate in that he’s been invited. This is an important issue and he plans to attend.

… David Ferris

For Outlook users, Office 2010 sports dramatically improved search speed and reliability, support for larger mailboxes, and myriad end-user productivity features. These include quick steps, conversation cleanup, the ability to ignore conversations, and the ability to reply to email threads in one click using instant messaging. For the first time, Outlook users can now communicate via text (SMS) messages with users of most mobile phone devices.

Multinational users will enjoy the translation functionality that is built into all Office applications, with both local and remote Web-service-based translation capabilities.

The familiar ribbon bar remains, as do popular features such as save as PDF, support for multiple calendars, sophisticated rule support, and task integration.

This will be the first release to be accompanied with an online version of Office – keep an eye on Microsoft’s Office Online Web site for the new Office 2010 applications to appear. This will become a compelling story for small businesses looking for an alternative to Google Apps.

Congratulations to the Office team on shipping a stellar release!

… David Sengupta. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is Chief Architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

A hybrid approach should also be considered. This manages email locally before it moves to the cloud for long-term retention. Email remains accessible and can be returned to local storage for legal discovery. The main advantage of the hybrid approach is that it provides the performance of local email archiving while leveraging cloud storage to reduce total storage costs.

Several vendors offer a hybrid approach to email archiving. Autonomy was one of the first with a combination of Digital Safe hosted email archiving and EAS on-premise email archiving.

Iron Mountain is a new market entry and combines its existing hosted service with the Mimosa NearPoint on-premise email archiving solution. Iron Mountain recently acquired Mimosa, and one of the reasons for its purchase was so Iron Mountain could offer this hybrid approach to email archiving.

… Bob Spurzem. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

• What they are and how they’re used (first bulletin)
• The problems of public folders (second bulletin)
• The migration options and the main issues to consider when migrating (this bulletin)

Main Alternatives
There are various alternatives to public folders. Microsoft’s SharePoint is the main one.

However, the alternative adopted will depend on the type of public folder used. In particular, pay attention to folders used for:

• Receiving email from the outside
• End-users “dragging and dropping” email from their Inbox
• Calendars being used for meeting requests as well as appointments
• Application integration

Determining the type of use helps establish whether SharePoint is the right repository. Sometimes an archive solution, contact management platform, or a shared mailbox may be more appropriate. There are also alternatives for the system uses of public folders. For example, organizational forms can be replaced by InfoPath, and Free/Busy lookups can be done via the Availability Service.

Migration Steps
It’s hard to migrate away from public folders. The key steps are to:

• Identify the data that is definitely stale and the data that is definitely used. Typically a stale folder has no posts in the last two years; a used one has posts in the last two weeks.
• Survey owners of the remaining unknown-status folders to categorize as either stale or used. The owner can approve the need of the folder as well as identify who should or should not have access to the data.
• Phase out stale folders through a staged deletion approach.
• Add structure and validate permissions on used folders.
• Migrate to the alternative repository.

Tools
The migration process is inevitably one that requires a lot of human attention. All the same, some tools can assist in the process.

Useful auditing tools are:

• Quest MessageStats. Provides information on inventory, stale public folders, and reports on both data and permissions.
• StealthAUDIT for Exchange. Provides the ability to send a survey to public folder owners with optional actions against individual public folders.

The following migrate data and permissions to SharePoint:

• Quest Public Folder Migrator for SharePoint
• Tzunami Deployer
• AvePoint DocAve

Specialized professional services firms can also help, such as SPHERE Technology Solutions.

… David Ferris and Rita Gurevich. Rita is founder of SPHERE Technology Solutions, a professional services organization that focuses on data management and clean-up initiatives in the Microsoft infrastructure.

• What they are and how they’re used (last bulletin)
• The problems of public folders (this bulletin)
• The migration options and the main issues to consider when migrating (next bulletin)

The Problems: User Perspective
Users love public folders. They are usually very simple to create and use. The only user problem is that as public folders grow, they cause response times to lengthen. The response time varies with the Outlook version, but if there are just 5,000 items in public folders, response time is probably acceptable. However, if you have 20,000 items in public folders, Outlook will usually be very slow to start, and may indeed hang when it tries to connect with the public folder hierarchy.

The Problems: IT Perspective
The main problems for IT are:

• Open access to sensitive information. The poor management tools, the ability of users to set access permissions, and the complex interactions of access permissions, mean that many folders containing sensitive information are open to far more people than they should be. For example, consider emails sent to credit-card-identify-theft-issues@megabank.com.
• User response times. As noted, these degrade significantly as public folders grow.
• Lack of management tools. It’s very hard to know who’s using public folders, and how, because when users access the folders, they often do so using the default or anonymous roles.
• Insufficient storage space. Public folders grow and grow, so new storage must be provided periodically:
  • Unlike normal Exchange folders, it’s impractical to impose size limits.
  • Users often use public folders to store large files.
  • When staff leave, material they have contributed is unlikely to be purged.
  • Because material is often contributed using the default permission, you can’t charge back to users based on the storage they use.
• Backups. A number of problems arise. For example, public folders can easily grow to the order of 1TB, in which case a backup may not complete within the available time window.
• SharePoint as teamspace direction. Microsoft’s direction for shared workspaces is SharePoint. SharePoint has gained much traction, and it’s clearly a better approach to informal collaboration than public folders.
• Approaching end-of-life. Microsoft has de-emphasized public folders, and will not provide the same new features as it does for Exchange mailboxes. Public folders will be supported through 2016.
• Cost of storage for SAN users. SAN users can find the cost of providing public folder storage is prohibitive. Costs of $80/GB are typical; this figure must be increased to allow for replication.

As a result, many organizations wish to migrate away from public folders. In the next bulletin, we discuss what the options are and the major issues to consider.

… David Ferris and Rita Gurevich. Rita is founder of SPHERE Technology Solutions, a professional services organization that focuses on data management and clean-up initiatives in the Microsoft infrastructure.

• What they are and how they’re used (this bulletin)
• The problems of public folders (next bulletin)
• The migration options and the main issues to consider when migrating (third bulletin)

What Public Folders Are
Public folders have been available since Exchange 4.0, which shipped in 1996. They represent an early attempt by Microsoft to provide a common space that users can work in. So they can be thought of as a precursor to SharePoint. In particular, public folders provide places where users can share email, files, calendars, and address book information.

Public folders are implemented as a MAPI folder hierarchy, potentially many folders deep. Most folders contain email messages, but in fact public folders can contain any Outlook/Exchange data type and conventional files.

As their name indicates, public folders are shared among users. Access controls can be defined on any part of the hierarchy, including the ability to delegate permission-setting to other users. Public folders reside on Exchange servers. To provide for ease of access for many users, they are typically replicated between different departmental servers.

To get a better feel for how they look from the user standpoint, see this 10-minute video.

How Public Folders Are Used
In a large organization, the top levels of the hierarchy typically represent a natural nesting of divisions, regions, departments, and so on, down to clusters of closely related users. The leaf folders contain actual information.

Common uses of leaf folders are:

• Archives of email-based discussions on a topic.
• Setting up meetings, through a shared calendar.
• Sharing address book information.
• Archiving emails with large attachments. Public folders aren’t usually purged, so dragging an email over to a public folder is a way of keeping a copy. This frees up space in the user’s main message store.
• Storing of application-generated alerts.
• Receiving email from outside. Public folders can be mail-enabled. So, for example, outsiders can send emails to sales-inquiries@megacorp.com, where staff can then respond.

In-house-developed public folder applications are also common, such as a help desk system, where forms are used to manage trouble tickets. The tickets are accessed via forms, and the information is stored in a public folder and its appropriate subfolder (e.g., “New Ticket,” “Being Worked On,” and “Resolved”).

Finally, a variety of third-party applications are available that use public folders. An example is Pertrac’s contact management applications, which are used by investment banking traders to share information about customers.

Access Controls
Two key roles must be defined:

• Default. This is for most internal users, and defines what they can do. The default settings are normally set to give a lot of power to users, to create and manage public folders, and delegate permissions to others.
• Anonymous. This is intended for external users, not identified in Active Directory. It lets them contribute items to a mail-enabled folder, but they cannot see it or modify the contents.

A wide variety of privileges can be assigned; administrator-only privileges include the definition of replication and limits settings. Access controls are inherited from higher folders, although they can be overridden.

… David Ferris and Rita Gurevich

Rita is founder of SPHERE Technology Solutions, a professional services organization that focuses on data management and clean-up initiatives in the Microsoft infrastructure.

Exchange 2010 introduces a new and substantially improved dumpster that fixes this design flaw, and offers additional benefits.

End users can use the dumpster to restore single emails that were deleted by mistake. Here is how it works: When an email is first deleted it moves to the Deleted Item folder. It remains there until the Deleted Item folder is emptied. Next, the deleted email moves into the dumpster where it is held according to a retention policy set by the administrator. Normally the dumpster retention period is set for 30 days, allowing users to change their mind and restore deleted email within that period.

The dumpster retention period can be set for longer periods or an unlimited time, and this is the important benefit to the organization. Organizations that require retention of email for regulatory compliance, for example, can use a dumpster retention period of n years as prescribed by the law. Organizations facing legal discovery can set the dumpster retention to an unlimited period, in effect putting email deletion on hold until the legal case is resolved.

Dumpster retention periods are set on a per-mailbox basis. Thus, if a legal case requires some of a user’s email to be retained indefinitely, for example, then all that user’s email is retained indefinitely.

Finally, it should be noted that the dumpster has an important role in the new backup strategy adopted from Exchange 2010 onwards. Because Exchange databases are so large, traditional backups and restores have become impractical. Thus, the approach to backup with Exchange is now:

• Keep one or more live copies of an Exchange database in case the main one gets damaged.
• Keep copies of emails around for some extended period elsewhere; e.g., in the archive or in the dumpster, so that users can restore a damaged or deleted email if they need to.

… Bob Spurzem

In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

A new report from Ferris Research, “The Current State of Email Retention Policies,” discusses today’s situation. It incorporates data from a survey of 22 organizations representing more than 443,000 mailboxes running Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise, and other email platforms. It also presents Ferris Research’s interpretation of the findings.

We discuss the key drivers behind the need to establish email retention policies, the policies that respondents have implemented, and the challenges they face in defining and enforcing these policies. Key findings include:

• Litigation holds and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are the largest drivers for retention policies. These are followed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
• Some 14% of the respondents (three of the 22 organizations surveyed) still rely solely on end-user archives such as personal storage tables (PSTs) or GroupWise archives for retention.
• Organizations treat unified messaging (UM) voicemail differently from email. The lack of discoverability is driving some organizations to avoid archiving voicemails.
• Heavily regulated or litigious businesses have the most complex retention policies and, thus, more costly storage and technology investments.
• Less-regulated markets typically adopt simple retention policies, such as 60-, 90-, or 120-day retention schedules managed through quotas and simple “spring cleaning” mailbox management.
• A dwindling but still significant number of respondents continue to use backups for retention.

The report can be downloaded here. There is no charge to do so.

… David Ferris

• One of the exciting new developments of Exchange 2010 is the introduction of Database Availability Groups (DAGs). DAGs protect Exchange database contents with disk-based database replication. Each Exchange database can have up to 16 replicas, all automatically managed by Exchange. In a typical setup, two to three database copies are sufficient to protect Exchange data. One of the “gotchas” of DAGs is the resulting storage increase. Even with three database replicas, the resulting storage increase can be significant.
• Say, for example, the average mailbox size is 1 gigabyte. Do you plan to implement the new Archive Mailbox features of Exchange 2010? If so, add another 2-3 gigabytes for long-term retention. Do you plan to upload existing PST files into the archive mailbox? If so, add another 1 gigabyte. Do you plan to use Exchange’s unified messaging and store voicemail? If so, add another 1 gigabyte. And finally, you need to factor in a 25% storage increase because single instance storage was removed with Exchange 2010. Depending on how you answer these questions, the average mailbox size could increase to 6-8 gigabytes.
• So for a three-copy DAG (two local and one remote for DR), the total storage capacity for the single mailbox increases from 1 gigabyte to 18-24 gigabytes!
• The example we use is hypothetical and obviously an extreme case. But it is clear that depending on how you implement Exchange 2010 archiving, PST management, unified messaging, and DAGs, storage capacity is substantially greater than previous Exchange versions if you implement all the features. Even if you provision Exchange with low-cost SATA drives, the resulting total storage is quite daunting.

This problem has not gone unnoticed. A new startup called StorSimple is developing a storage appliance that bridges local and cloud storage in a seamless manner. If it all works, you could use the StorSimple appliance for Exchange 2010 storage and leverage all the extra capacity required with DAGs with inexpensive cloud storage (you pick the cloud vendor). An interesting idea.

… David Ferris

We think Google will incorporate Episodic into YouTube, further maturing the video delivery and management mechanisms in YouTube to approach some of the capabilities of online TV. TV advertising is a major force behind the television industry, and Episodic dramatically increases YouTube’s capabilities to insert a variety of advertising mechanisms into its offering.

These technologies don’t just affect the consumer market. As online video approaches the capabilities and quality of television, we are entering a world where every enterprise PC is a television. The recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver were one example where employees the world over used online video to watch the events unfold throughout the workday, with obvious implications around employee productivity.

As online video matures, enterprises will need solutions to block, manage, and control who can watch what sorts of content online. We predict the evolution of a niche market in the next 3-5 years where solutions evolve to fit this need.

David Sengupta

In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is Chief Architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

• Location: ability to auto-detect or populate your location based on WiFi/subnet information, etc.
• Skill search: ability to find contacts based on a user’s skills, projects, or interests. This information is pulled from their SharePoint profile (which has to be manually populated one time), which OCS grabs via Web services.

A number of other enhancements to the client focus on usability. Social networking capabilities are also added, as would seem to be the case with all of Microsoft’s client applications these days.

The Microsoft announcement was accompanied by a flurry of third-party announcements. Most notable was Polycom’s announcement of three new phones:

• CX500 IP Phone — optimized for use in public areas like coffee shops and airports
• CX600 IP Desktop Phone — a midrange desktop phone
• CX300 IP Conference Phone — a conference unit that integrates with OCS 14

With Microsoft’s ongoing battle with Cisco and IBM for the Unified Communications marketplace, we view OCS 14 primarily as an attempt to level the playing ground. Microsoft’s entry into the Unified Communications space is still comparatively young, and Microsoft has needed to mature features and performance to compete effectively. It would appear that OCS 14 plays a key role in achieving feature parity for Microsoft.

David Sengupta

In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is Chief Architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

We agree with the author of this article on TechSpot that the timing of this event is intended to detract from Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone 4.0 operating system.

If rumors are true, these devices will be positioned as social networking hubs that resemble a hybrid of a touchscreen Apple iPhone and a Microsoft Zune. If Microsoft provides a low price-point, we predict these devices will start appearing in small and midsize organizations sometime soon – bringing new challenges to companies striving to achieve data leak protection or other forms of compliance. With many companies starting to push mobile device costs back to their users, this further accentuates the challenges of mobile device management.

… David Sengupta

In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is Chief Architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

• EV currently uses the aging AltaVista search engine. This has limited functionality, and support for it is being dropped. In 2014, AltaVista turns read-only: No new material will be indexed, and only searches will be allowed.
• Symantec has been working on finding a replacement for the last few years.
• Symantec recently decided to replace AltaVista with Vivisimo’s Velocity search engine.
• The new engine will be available in late 2011.

Symantec will have to decide how to integrate the new technology:

• One option is rip and replace: Customers extract all content from the archive, uninstall EV, reinstall the new software, and then reingest all content.
• However, this would be a major project for many customers–figure 12-24 months for larger customers!
• Many customers are unhappy with EV, and would like to move to more modern technology. If Symantec chooses a rip-and-replace strategy, the upgrade efforts will be a catalyst for movement to more modern archiving technology.
• Therefore, we doubt Symantec will go for rip and replace.
• The other, more likely option, is that EV will support both AltaVista and Vivisimo searches. All new material will be indexed by Vivisimo; older material will keep the AltaVista indices. This will be a little inelegant at times; e.g., Vivisimo search queries are more powerful than those of AltaVista.

Customer issues:

• As noted above, the time taken to rebuild indices with a search engine will be a problem for many larger organizations.
• AltaVista’s indices take very little space–around 12% of the material indexed. The new indices will need more space. Some search engines, such as those of Mimosa, have indices that take as much storage as the material being indexed [Note: Mimosa indices are really only 20% to 30% of the indexed material, although usually customers create a 100% shadow copy when indexing--see discussion in comments].
• AltaVista has prevented a 64-bit version of EV. Vivisimo will permit this. A 64-bit version of EV will run faster and better than the current 32-bit version; e.g., it can use faster hardware, and it can use more memory.
• Instead of Vivisimo Velocity, many customers would prefer a more mainstream search engine, such as Microsoft FAST, Autonomy Idol, or Google Search Appliance. Presumably Idol wasn’t an option, because Autonomy is a major competitor to EV.
• Vivisimo will allow more sophisticated searches (e.g., substrings, proximity searches) than have been possible with AltaVista.

… David Ferris, with many thanks to our well-connected source who requests anonymity

• Ensures that email is retained
• Manages the length of time the email is kept, before it is automatically deleted

In other words, retention management manages the email life cycle. Retention is a requirement for industries such as financial services, health science, and public government. It’s also beneficial for any organization that must produce email, say for legal discovery or a freedom of information request.

Exchange 2007 introduced limited retention management tools, and had correspondingly limited success. Exchange 2007 managed the expiration of email folder contents, but it failed to prevent users from deleting email. Thus, it allowed users to circumvent an email retention policy. Exchange 2010 has fixed this major flaw with a new deleted folder (dumpster) design. Exchange 2010 has retention settings for mailbox folders and dumpster. The retention period is set for a time period (days) or indefinitely for a legal hold.

Compared with third-party archiving solutions, the retention management built into Exchange 2010 is improved, but a fundamental difference remains. Exchange 2010 manages email in a place where it can be altered by users. A third-party archiving solution manages a copy of email in its archive where the email content is secure and unalterable. This is an important difference for industries with strict compliance rules.

… Bob Spurzem

In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

Microsoft is very aware of the problem, and its solution is the Archive Mailbox, a new feature of Exchange 2010. Microsoft recommends that all existing PST files be uploaded into the Archive Mailbox. PSTs are still used to move email between servers and they no longer serve as general mailbox expansion.

There are at least two administrative issues that arise in connection with the new PST handling:

• When you are dealing with thousands of files, you need a PST uploading tool that is scalable and robust. The Exchange 2010 PST uploading tool is only meant for single PST file use. Not a scalable solution.
• Much more storage is needed for the PST files. Backup of Exchange databases is already a problem, given narrow backup windows. However, with the ballooning due to PST ingestion, many admins will need to adopt a new approach to backup. In particular, database security must now depend on 1) multiple live database shadow copies, and 2) the new dumpster, which can be used to retrieve old, deleted messages

… Bob Spurzem and David Ferris. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

SharedDoc has just announced a solution:

• Users can post comments and discuss presentations.
• One person retains control and makes edits.
• Comments are made via a Web browser.
• The tool is mainly aimed at cases where at least three people need to review and make comments.
• Initially free.
• Web-based service.

MS Word’s tracking capabilities are well known. After several edits, the tracking quickly becomes unwieldy. All the same, it’s a valuable set of tools, and something glaringly missing from PowerPoint. SharedDoc’s technology appears to be the only tool specifically designed to support collaborative PowerPoint development. It’s especially valuable when large numbers of people must review a document.

… David Ferris

The tool provides a simple mechanism for small companies wishing to take the leap to Google Apps. Users can upload a comma separated values (.csv) file to Google with the names of users to be migrated. Options include:

• Migrate all messages or only new messages
• Migrate some/all of email, contacts, calendar, deleted items, and junk email
• Migrate only mail that meets certain sent or received date ranges

Migrations can be throttled to only a given number of users simultaneously; for example, in the case of limited bandwidth. Simple progress indicators monitor the migration, with info- and failure-level error logging possible.

Caveats are that the tool performs a simple one-way data migration, and lacks the following:

• Coexistence for migrations that last more than a weekend
• Project management capabilities for mid- to large-sized migrations
• Migration reporting
• Ability to schedule a migration

Small companies that are confident that Google Apps will meet their needs and that can migrate in a weekend will be happy with this tool. Larger companies will want to look for partner solutions.

… David Sengupta. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is chief architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

Functionality:

• Works with Exchange/Outlook 2003/7/10.
• Archive maintained on-premises or in the cloud.
• Has Outlook plugin–to access the archive, users click on Archive button.
• Browser access also available.
• Everything is archived and users can’t delete material from the archive. So when users delete messages from their live Exchange store, they can still retrieve the deleted material from the archive. Hence no retention policies apply; users can delete material from their main mailbox whenever they want.
• Search works across messages and attachments in the normal fashion.
• Administrators can search across multiple mailboxes.
• Storage can be split across different types of cost/speed repositories.
• Administrators can determine one very basic retention policy: Delete all material over X years.
• No legal holds necessary, because everything is kept. Searches aren’t tracked or auditable.
• Very simple to install; very simple for users.
• One IT person is in complete control.
• All access controls based on Active Directory permissions.

Company and Financials:

• Pricing starts about $30/user for perpetual licenses; 18% maintenance.
• Cloud pricing example: 150-employee organization maintains half a terabye. Cost is about $1/user/month.
• Product first shipped in 2006.
• Company is privately held and Ferris Research estimates revenues at $2.5M to $3M annually.

Comment:

• The philosophy of keeping everything forever makes sense, notwithstanding the valid concerns of legal teams. Ultimately, this is what most organizations will end up doing, because….
• The cost of storage is too cheap, and the cost of determining and implementing a retention policy is too great. A lot of past material is valuable in e-discovery when you’re the good guy. Plus a tiny proportion of past material ends up being useful for other reasons.

… David Ferris

We still subscribe largely to that view. However, it’s not true for organizations that are committed to storage area networks (SANs). Here is a more detailed analysis.

SANs are used in many Exchange environments. They are expensive, however, so many Exchange users prefer to offload rarely accessed and archived material to less expensive storage.

For example, 18 terabytes (TB) of NetApp Fibre Channel SAN costs about $240,000 when switches, controllers, shelves, and software are included. After allowing for snapshots, this gives perhaps 12 TB of usable storage, which translates to $20 per gigabyte (GB). Most customers run Exchange 2010 in RAID 10, which doubles the cost. Furthermore, many customers have redundant sites to provide for better recoverability. So total SAN costs often reach an exorbitant $80 per GB.

With Exchange 2010, the archive is part of the main message store. Additionally, message stores now contain a lot of material formerly stored in Personal Storage Table (PST) files. If SANs are used, the cost of the additional storage is crippling: An extra 5 GB per user translates to $400 per user!

Exchange 2010 responds to the problem by supporting more modern, inexpensive storage. This also reduces message store I/O by some 90%, since Exchange 2003 provides for slower disk speeds. Modern non-SAN storage costs are about $0.30 per GB, including RAID 10 and redundant servers.

Microsoft hopes that the new drive technology will thus resolve the storage cost problem. It will be useful in many cases, but it is not a panacea. Many organizations have a sunk investment in SANs for a number of applications. These organizations will be resistant to using a separate set of technologies, with separate management tools, for the special case of email.

Thus, for Exchange users who have invested in SANs and are committed to the technology, storage cost is an issue for all versions of Exchange, including Exchange 2010. For SAN users, third-party archiving tools will continue to be an attractive way of allowing live mailboxes to live on SANs while archives reside on less expensive media.

… David Ferris, with particular thanks to Alan Elliot and Kevin Hood of Mirapoint, for educating me on the real costs

Thoughts:

• Hitherto the offering has consisted of email, IM, fax, and SharePoint.
• This is the first time we’ve heard of a hosted email offering providing integrated telephony.
• Telephony doesn’t require high bandwidth. However, it does require short latency. Packets need to get through reasonably quickly. Think of Skype’s periodic problems. Latency isn’t a problem if the packets go over an in-house network. But when they go over the public Internet, as they will with SMBs, quality of service becomes an issue. Time is on Intermedia’s side, and by 2020 latency shouldn’t be a problem for voice throughout the world.
• Intermedia is one of the few hosted Exchange vendors to be making money. The company is privately held and doesn’t disclose revenues, but we estimate its hosted Exchange revenues at around $40M annually.
• For more information, go here.

… David Ferris

One of the lesser-known changes to Exchange 2010 is the removal of single instance storage (SIS). The reason for this is related to an architectural change, disk I/O performance, and the availability of cheap disk.

There tends to be a trade-off between better disk I/O performance and reduced storage capacity. Architecturally, Exchange 2010 introduces a new per-mailbox table structure that replaces the original per-database table structure. The original per-database table structure was optimized for SIS, but disk I/O suffered. The new per-mailbox table structure improves disk I/O, but without SIS.

In place of SIS, Exchange 2010 uses compression. Only large, redundant attachments files truly benefit from SIS; otherwise, compression delivers roughly the same volume of data as SIS.

For further information, see this Exchange team blog discussion.

… Bob Spurzem

In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.

Costs:

• SharePoint archiving: $9.95/user/month
• Social Archive:$5/URL and $20/typical domain
• Volume discounts apply
• Search and e-discovery services are extra

For more information, go here.

Comments:

• Email is the most important data type to archive. However, ultimately what counts is information rather than the data types in which it’s stored. LO is right to extend its offering beyond email.
• SharePoint support is especially important. Very large amounts of compliance- and e-discovery-sensitive material are kept in these workspaces.
• The SharePoint support is initially limited to files and emails; e.g., no calendars or address books. Broader support for SharePoint content is planned.
• As of January 2010, FINRA started issuing guidance on social media. This is a clear indicator of the importance of these technologies to end customers.
• The Web site archiving works as follows: The user specifies the URLs of pages that should be archived, and how frequently a PDF snapshot should be stored. The PDFs are then archived; word lists generated by Adobe are indexed to provide for review and e-discovery.
• Most broker/dealers are small businesses, with simple Web sites. The static-URL-based scanning should suffice for most of them, as far as FINRA social networking compliance is concerned.
• The technology is very much version one in nature. It ignores the structure and meaning of the pages being stored, so searches are much weaker than they should be (more false positives and false negatives). Also, no doubt LO will want to add support for dynamically created URLs, such as database-driven content.
• APIs for social networks are still crude. They will improve, and that will help third parties such as LiveOffice provide much tighter integration.
• LiveOffice is privately held and doesn’t disclose its financials. Ferris estimates revenues at perhaps $30M annually for its hosted archiving and e-discovery business. The company is profitable.

… David Ferris

Everything was in fact OK. The company’s Ken Anderson told us:

• We had technical issues this morning that created some intermittent access to some of our services for some of our clients. No customer data has been lost or compromised – all back-end operations have been operating business as usual. Service has been restored, and steps are being taken to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.
• The situation was exacerbated for us because it also affected our phones and Web site. Unfortunately, with the phone and Web site down, conditions were ripe for speculation. We have had an all-hands-on-deck client outreach effort today, making sure to communicate the status. (And as the communications rep, trust me, we are addressing these circumstances as well!)

So no real news here. It does illustrate, obviously, that cloud vendors need to have an extremely reliable offering. There is almost no tolerance for downtime.

… David Ferris

Iron Mountain has a vested interest in building bridges between customer on-premise deployments and its Digital Archive, and the company has been building partnerships with numerous on-premise archiving vendors to build bridges into their products. The idea is that as on-premise archives grow stale, customers will treat Digital Archive as a third tier of nearline storage at Iron Mountain’s hosting facilities. Today’s move places Iron Mountain into direct competition with other archiving vendors, and therefore casts a shadow over its partnership initiatives.

Thoughts:

• Allows Iron Mountain to offer on-premise archiving. That makes sense.
• Iron Mountain acquires a good-size customer pool that it will no doubt try to upsell into its Digital Archive.
• Also provides a new offering for Digital Archive customers.
• It seems rather late in the game to be entering the on-premise archiving market. Two powerful forces that Iron Mountain faces are the shift toward storing data in the cloud, and native archiving capabilities included in platforms such as Exchange 2010.
• By virtue of its leadership position in hardcopy archiving, Iron Mountain could be a dominant force in digital archiving. It has failed so far to achieve such a position.
• Iron Mountain is most reticent to give figures about its digital archiving business. We suspect that despite its major name in hardcopy archiving, those revenues are extremely modest.
• Iron Mountain has a series of archiving offerings that must now be sorted out. For example, it has its own code, plus offerings from MessageOne and MIMEcast. Products or services will need to be dropped, and interfaces made consistent. Integrating different products is difficult, and it’s not clear Iron Mountain has good skills in this regard.
• Iron Mountain has a very confusing mix of digital offerings. It badly needs to develop a clear vision of how these fit together.
• We hear that partly because of this confusion, the Iron Mountain sales team has a tough time selling the digital archiving portfolio.
• A million dollars here, a million dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money ….. On the other hand, Iron Mountain is a large company. It can afford to invest $100M or so in acquisitions, without having to worry too much about the success of the investment.
• Iron Mountain has made a number of acquisitions, and established a number of technology partnerships. Some have gained traction, others haven’t. Overall, it feels like a strategy of trying this and that, and seeing what works. If you’re a big, rich, successful company, you can afford that approach.

Regarding the transaction:

• We estimate Mimosa was generating about $25M/year and had flat revenues. (ACTUALLY IT DID $20.6M IN CALENDAR 2009)
• Mimosa had never been profitable. We estimate it was losing about $10M/year. (ACTUALLY IT HAD $32.7M EXPENSES IN CALENDAR 2009, SO WAS LOSING ABOUT $12M/year)
• Mimosa took around $70M to $100M in investment funding. The investors had evidently decided not to put in more money, and the company was forced to find a buyer. See our December 2009 bulletin, “Mimosa Funding Challenges”.
• The $112M valuation is a roughly 4.5 multiplier on sales (ACTUALLY IT WAS A 5.4:1 RATIO). This is an excellent price for shareholders, especially in today’s climate. The goodwill generated toward Iron Mountain will help ease the trauma of a merger.
• We presume the VCs will get their money back, and the founders will get a small amount of money, but not enough to retire. Everyone else is probably wiped out.
• The $112M was probably largely determined so that VCs and bank-like creditors get their cash back.

All further input welcome: Either post here or email david.ferris@ferris.com. If you want anonymity, let me know and we won’t disclose your identity.

… David Ferris

Comments:

• Helps Cloudmark offer a fuller messaging solution to service providers. That makes sense.
• Bizanga executed well in a very difficult, highly competitive market.
• It succeeded in getting some major, high-visibility clients, including Cox Communications.
• Bizanga investors had extremely high revenue expectations that were probably always unrealistic.
• Bizanga had taken about $12M in three rounds between 2003 and 2009. The company achieved a lot with that–most others would have eaten through much more.
• Purchase value guesstimated at $5M to $20M. Bizanga revenues estimated at perhaps $3M or $4M annually; Bizanga never really got into profitability.
• Very unlikely that investors got a decent return; at best they’ll have gotten their money back.
• Bizanga was a delightfully classy operation, reminding us that Man does not live by bread alone. Its gourmet dinners are fondly remembered by anyone lucky enough to have been invited (including your current interlocutor); its customers-and-us souvenir photo albums were also strikingly elegant.

Does anyone have hard information on the deal cut, and Bizanga’s P&L prior to the transaction? Please post here or email david.ferris@ferris.com if you can help–anonymity obviously respected if you want anonymity. Thanks!

… David Ferris

The agenda includes:

• An opportunity to sound off on what you like and don’t like about Exchange Server, and where you think Microsoft is missing out compared with other messaging platforms like Gmail, Lotus Live, Cisco and others. Your feedback will passed on to Microsoft’s Exchange team after the event.
• Depending on Microsoft development timeframes, we hope to be able to run a session on Exchange 2010 SP1.

Other sessions on the agenda include the following Microsoft speakers:

• Scott Schnoll and Ross Smith IV speaking about the many facets of Exchange 2010
• Konstantin Ryvkin speaking about Microsoft’s internal deployment of Exchange 2010
• Brett Shirley speaking about the internals of the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), B-tree splits, etc.

Unified communications content will include:

• Lee Mackey speaking about his hands-on experiences on many Office Communication Server deployments
• Anthony Vitnell speaking about the challenges of Microsoft/Cisco unified communications coexistence

This will not be a marketing event, but rather a deep technical conference. If you’re planning to attend, send us an email — we’d love to see you there.

David Sengupta. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, David is Chief Architect for Quest Software, and has been a Microsoft Exchange MVP since 1998.

Third-party on-premise archiving vendors struggle constantly with indexing technologies. Indices get corrupt and take days or weeks to regenerate. Searches return results that aren’t as expected, or aren’t understood. Indexing technologies age, and when a vendor replaces them, your corporate memory looks very different.

To understand the challenges, think of Outlook:

• It’s often hard to find email in PSTs.
• You frequently don’t get what you’re looking for.
• You get “indexing is not complete” messages.

Now consider e-discovery on a corporate scale. Searches become critically important. For example, you may need to defend your CEO against accusations that might land him in jail; your CEO is certain that an email is there, but the search tool can’t locate it. In the meantime, you have five days to find the email, and the clock is ticking.

Exchange 2010 includes a new discovery module that searches primary and archive mailboxes, and works across multiple mailboxes. It is built by one of the smartest teams in the Exchange product group. However, it’s unclear whether or not the search will be good enough. If it’s like our experiences with Outlook search, the answer is no.

We think Exchange search should be a lot better than that of Outlook. Nevertheless, the challenges are substantial, and there is a good possibility that it won’t be up to the job. For example:

• Important file types may not be supported.
• Documentation may be unclear on how to adjust the index, and when adjustments need to take place.
• Users may not understand the results of a search.
• There may be problems with non-English searches.
• Wildcards and stemming support may be limited.

We would welcome input from readers on their practical experience with Exchange 2010 searches in the stressed and demanding environment of e-discovery.

… David Sengupta

Examples of what has changed:

• Paper-based maps and manual navigation have been replaced with cloud-based maps and GPS systems.
• Photography has shifted from film-based to digital, with processing and often photo albums primarily cloud-based.
• Books are moving from paper-based to electronic paper or digital, with cloud-based ordering and digital library functions.
• Email systems are transitioning from on-premises to cloud-based solutions.
• Print media and advertising have largely gone online.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have moved online.

And examples of what is likely:

• Enterprise telephony will shift from on-premises PBX to cloud-based VoIP solutions.
• Home-based landlines will be replaced by mobile phones.
• Backup and recovery systems will move to the cloud.
• Systems management will move to the cloud.
• Archiving and compliance will move to the cloud.
• E-discovery solutions will move to the cloud.
• Systems with heavy processing requirements will shift to elastic compute technologies.
• File storage will move from local computer-based or external hard drive-based to primarily cloud-based.
• What remains of fax will disappear.
• Human-operator-based conference call bridges will go away.
• Translation services will be mainly automated and go online.
• Paper-based billing will be completely replaced by online.

In each case, the primary technologies and delivery mechanisms will move to the cloud. On-premises solutions will become the exception, not the norm.

As you navigate town with your GPS, BlackBerry by your side, with your new Kindle reading your ebooks to you via text-to-speech as you drive, we suggest you reflect on this. The shift towards the cloud is compelling, and in some ways, irresistible.

…David Sengupta

• They’ve lost a huge amount of customer archived email over the past couple of weeks
• Many customers are making inquiries about other vendors and their ability to ingest/absorb their historic archive data
• One vendor told us they had been asked to help customers move their emails back from Dell/MessageOne and the most efficient way to ingest large amounts of data (10 TB for example)

Can anyone helps further? If you have input, please send to me at david.ferris@ferris.com or call me on +1 415 367 3436. If you prefer to be anonymous, let me know and we won’t publish anything that identifies you.

… David Ferris

Main services from the user standpoint:

• User directory.
• Users can belong to many different interest groups.
• Each interest group provides:
  • Common bulletin board/wall
  • Directory of interesting events
  • Q&A/forums for advice sharing
  • User-contributed news

Finances:

• Most use is free.
• Around 10% pay for services. This is pretty good compared with LinkedIn, which appears to have around 1% who pay.
• Fee is around 6 euros ($9) per month if you’re a paying subscriber.
• Ferris Research estimates revenues at $40 million annually. The company is profitable and growing at a healthy clip. It’s taken a total of 15 million euros ($23 million) external funding.
• Revenue breakdown:
  • User subscriptions: about 50%
  • Recruiting tools sold to HR and consultants: about 25%
  • Advertising: about 25%

Observations:

• The collaboration tools are conventional but attractive.
• The rich collaborative environment means that in principle, Viadeo can offer extremely targeted advertising, for which advertisers should be prepared to pay handsomely.
• Viadeo’s collaboration tools are an important point of differentation from LinkedIn, which is directory-centric.
• Viadeo’s localizations–e.g., it is currently offered in Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish–are another important differentiator.
• Around 10% of subscribers pay up. This is pretty good compared with LinkedIn, which appears to have around 1% who pay.

… David Ferris

Archiving vendors take several approaches to email archiving. Some access mailboxes via MAPI and pull items out into the archive. Others intercept SMTP traffic and journal a copy into the archive. Others copy the database transaction logfiles (‘log shipping’) and rebuild the email database for archive reasons.

Journaling only captures what has been sent. MAPI and log shipping capture the Drafts folder.

This story on CNN contains a nugget about why archiving Drafts is important. “A Yahoo! e-mail account was set up so the men and militants could communicate …. E-mails were never sent from the account, but people would leave messages in the draft folder and delete them after reading.”

Whenever a law or compliance regime exists, people will try and get around it. Archiving Drafts is necessary for compliance.

… David Sengupta

Overall, Microsoft is optimistic that mailboxes will be able to grow to 10GB or more. However, it’s unclear how large mailboxes will perform in practice. Several concerns spring to mind:

• By leveraging low cost disk, it is feasible, according to Microsoft, to store email online for up to 10 years. If you assume a typical user stores 5 MB of new email daily, this translates to 1.8 GB of email per year. Allowing for the continued growth in average message size, this translates to perhaps 10GB mailbox sizes over three years. For 100 users, this means 1 TB of total storage for Exchange. For 1,000 users, 10 TB of email storage! Managing multiple terabytes of storage is no simple matter when you take into account disk failures, power consumption, disaster protection, daily maintenance and monitoring, and so on
• Database maintenance and ESEUTIL need space. Offline defragmentation requires 110% free disk space. Thus the amount of storage required should be doubled for maintenance purposes. True, Microsoft advises that offline defragging is unnecessary and inadvisable; hopefully this turns out to be wise counsel
• If we wish to use the new Database Availability Groups for data protection and failover, extra copies will be required. Two to three copies seems likely, which implies another 2-3X in email storage
• Single instance storage is no longer supported, which means message stores can’t be shrunk by 20% or 30% or so

In a typical scenario, for every 1 TB of primary database storage, perhaps another 3-4 TB of disk space may be necessary for various support capabilities, such as Database Availability Groups. This can quickly translate into a large amount of storage.

All in all, I doubt Microsoft’s claims that imply storing TB’s of email data online is a simple proposition.

… Bob Spurzem

It’s just IMAP-IMAP email, no address book or calendar migration services. No, it doesn’t even migrate Notes apps.

… David Ferris

• $3M of equity in June, 2009
• $4M of debt in November, 2009

Mimosa has never made a profit, and the recession of course has made fund-raising harder. We understand an IPO was deferred due to poor results. We understand, too, that Mimosa sought a buyer last year, but the valuations weren’t acceptable to management.

No doubt management is working hard to align revenues with expenses.

We don’t know the details, but presumably the cost of the recent financings has been high. In situations such as this, companies with good technology can find they’re forced into a fire sale buyout. Sometimes a small short-term debt financing is an immediate precursor to a fire sale.

If an acquisition takes place, it is to be hoped that the acquirer will continue to invest in Mimosa’s technology. Sadly, this doesn’t always happen. Many acquisitions end in tears, especially where the purchase was inexpensive.

… David Ferris

Concern is sometimes expressed about the cost of Exchange 2010 storage:

• Users will have large mailboxes. 5GB to 20GB will be common. Take 10GB as a typical figure, allowing for three years of mailbox growth
• Then factor in some multiplier, perhaps 3 or 4, to account for the optional features of Database Availability Group. The multiplier could be much larger, but most organizations won’t go for maximal bloat
• So the average storage will commonly be around 30GB per mailbox

In short, user mailboxes are set to get substantially larger.

This will translate to many administrative challenges, but cost is unlikely to be one. At today’s prices, 30GB costs from $2 to $30, depending on the storage type. Amortize that over three years, makes $0.66 to $10 per mailbox per year. $10 is an absolute maximum, most storage will cost much less than this. Some of this storage will replace local storage used to keep PSTs. Looked at on a per-user basis, the cost of storage for Exchange 2010 are trivial.

… David Ferris

There is something sacred about the last messages exchanged with a spouse before a loved one dies. Messages of love. Hurt. Panic. Fear. Impending death. Yet we struggle with a lust for information, and the Internet makes it easy for us to disrespect personal privacy and ethics.

E-discovery brings with it an element of responsibility. Whether investigators are searching email, text messages, or other electronic data, there is an implied code of conduct around how the evidence is to be handled.

Posting these messages online represents a breach of privacy and a rupture in the ethical standards that should exist in any modern nation. In the words of one of the commentators, corkpuller, “deep wounds that have healed need not be reopened for the morbid curiosity of those who want to sell more soap and toilet paper.”

… David Sengupta

In this case, over a thousand emails were taken and posted publicly. This has resulted in numerous accusations of collusion and warped data around global warming statistics in the blogosphere.

Scientists are accused of taking climate change data, and then wrongly adding their assumptions around “corrective” factors to normalize the data. The scientists claim they did so in an attempt to more accurately reflect reality. They claim opponents have not read their papers explaining why they adjusted figures the way they did. Opponents claim the scientists are hiding the fact that global warming isn’t as bad as the scientists claim.

Opinion. Perception. Lessons learned in the school playground. He said. She said.

One of the fundamentals of human existence is that each of us perceives the world through the lens of our particular world view. We live trapped within our context, and cannot be as objective as any of us would wish to be. An ancient Chinese proverb says, “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask the fish.”

When it comes to interpreting the evidence – especially with something as ad hoc as email – it is absolutely critical to make every effort to understand the context within which a statement was made.

Claiming you have found a smoking gun, without having a clear understanding of the context, can lead to fatally flawed arguments. If you are building a case on such evidence, you are on shaky ground.

… David Sengupta

One approach is Track-Changes, which we’re all familiar with in MS Word. This is very useful. But then, after three or four sets of changes, it gets too confusing. The Track-Changes approach is best between two people; it does a reasonable job of letting you see what changes have been made.

Another approach is one we’ve just been looking at, that of SharedDoc, from SharedBook. Here, someone owns/controls a document. Other people can post responses at arbitrary points to comment on the content. Subresponses of arbitrary depth are allowed. Here, comments aren’t applied, unless the owner specifically decides to allow them. Reviewers must be specifically selected by the owner. This is another approach valuable in a variety of contexts where one seeks reviewer input, such as proposals, legal services, business documents, and publishing. SharedDoc is in beta, by the way, and is currently free.

Some other approaches to editing shared documents include:

• Wikis, where people can go in and make changes directly, with an audit trail of the changes. You find this approach in Google Wave.
• Content management-style versioning. You also find this in SharePoint, for example.

… David Ferris, with thanks to SharedBooks’ Caroline Vanderlip for her interesting insights

In principle, it’s much better to treat the audio as just another data type for the conference and route it over a data network. This makes things much easier for users, because you can have tight integration with the conferencing application. No remembering and entering phone numbers, for example. And usually cheaper.

Internally, companies often run the audio part of conferencing over their in-house data network, because their internal network is fast enough and delivers data in a timely way. However, where participants must connect over public data networks, notably the public Internet, it’s common to fall back on conventional telephony, because voice transmission over public data network connections often is not quite good enough for the audio part of a conferencing session (even though most of us have experienced pretty good voice quality at times via Skype).

There are two reasons for this audio-over-Internet shortfall:

• Voice over IP technologies like Skype convey voices much less well when several people are chiming in and even talking over one another–as quite often happens in a conferencing session — than they do for a one-to-one conversation
• Conferencing behavior is very sensitive to slight delays in delivering the voice signal voice, known as “latency”. In the public Internet, there’s lots of latency, long and variable, as individual packets of data are delivered via widely varying routes through the network. For a discussion via electronic conferencing, that means all those subtle unwritten rules–about when and how it’s OK, or not OK, to chip in and interrupt–get really disrupted. Users find that very unsettling

When will the public Internet be good enough so that it’s the default for the audio element of conferencing? Our current guess is around 2014 in most rich countries. In other places, probably quite a bit longer than that. Could be 2040 in some places.

However, that only applies to users who depend on the public Internet, with its best efforts/no promises level of Quality of Service (QoS). More and more businesses are buying Wide Area Ethernet services from telephone companies. Those are IP networks, like the public Internet, but unlike the public Internet they use quality-enhancing techniques like MPLS that reduce latency, lost packets and other QoS problems. Users of such services will likely be able to realize the full benefits of routing both the voice and data parts of a conferencing session together over a data network, long before it becomes the usual method for users who rely entirely on the public Internet.

… David Ferris, with thanks to Michael Tyler for his helpful input

However, I think the biggest innovations, starting perhaps in 2012, will be found among mobile phones. These will have sufficient bandwidth and computing power to compete with desktops. However:

• Their user interfaces are severely constrained
• They are always with the user
• They have, or will have, location awareness
• They will have plenty of other very innovative aspects

Thus the exciting conferencing developments will, several years hence, turn around mobile phones.

The phones will remain small so that they can easily fit in a pocket. Obviously they’ll continue to get thinner. Innovation–in ways we don’t imagine–will help us get by with small screens. Presumably, videocameras will often be built in.

… David Ferris

• Document sharing, so people can work on spreadsheets, word processing documents, and so on, at the same time
• Informal peer-to-peer help desks and training. Where you show someone how to do something

… David Ferris

PS. I’m not sure I’m saying anything useful here! But I hope someone finds this useful.

… David Ferris

P.S. Sometimes concision is a virtue.

Over the last five years, PC-based solutions have been evolving. IBM/Lotus has been an innovator. Microsoft has gradually been building a position through Office Communications Server and Live Meeting. Ditto Cisco, around WebEx.

It’s clear that PC-based solutions will dominate this market before long. They are much cheaper and are simpler to use, both from the user and the IT standpoint. PC-based will be constantly improving and constantly eating in to high end systems’ capabilities. Video images will be of ever-higher quality, for example.

My hunch is that not merely will high end solutions be marginalized, but they will also be driven out of business. There will be a market for high-end conferencing solutions, but they will be based on commodity PC technology.

Microsoft overall has the advantage in this market, because it can provide the most user- and IT-familiar technology. Expect strong competition from Cisco over the next few years. Hopefully, the competition from IBM/Lotus will also be strong: it has much going for it.

… David Ferris

By way of background, in October email archiving vendor ZL Technologies filed a law suit against Gartner asking for $1.7B in damages caused in part by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The story is very interesting from several points of view:

• It raises the issue of the influence, good or bad, that reports like the Magic Quadrant have on company fortunes
• It raises the question of whether the reports are as objective and valuable as they purport to be
• It’s a “David” vs. “Goliath” struggle, as the small ZL takes on the much larger and very influential Gartner

The news just came out that the judge dismissed the law suit and gave ZL 30 days to amend its compliant. The judge agreed with Gartner’s view that the report is an opinion, not facts. But the judge left the door open for ZL to amend its motion and try again. The response from ZL owner Kon Leong suggests he intends to do that.

… David Ferris

• 123Together
• AppRiver
• Apptix
• Azaleos
• Cisco WebEx Mail
• Google Apps (Premier)
• groupSPARK
• Intermedia
• Microsoft Exchange Online
• PanTerra Networks
• USA.NET
• Yahoo! Zimbra
• Other POP/IMAP-based solutions
• Personal Email Accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live HotMail)

This is quite interesting, in that it can help migrations from on-premises mail servers (Microsoft Exchange Server, IBM Lotus Domino, Sendmail) to the cloud or from one hosted provider to another:

• LiveOffice’s archive will help on-premises and cloud-based Exchange services co-exist, during proof of concept and migration (think of it as a low-risk way to step into the cloud)
• It helps customers be less locked into a given email vendor, because the archive makes migration between the various offerings (on-premises and hosted) much simpler

Until 18 months ago, LiveOffice was mainly known for its financial services archiving solution and Hosted Exchange offering. The announcement confirms that the main focus of the company is now hosted archiving for financial services and non-financial services organizations alike.

… David Ferris

• BPOS (the bundle of Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, and Live Meeting) has a million paid seats.
• Largest customer is Glaxo Smith Kline, with 100,000 seats.
• Microsoft continues to prefer to deliver via business partners. They get 12% of the initial sale, and 6% of ongoing revenues.
• Currently sold into 20 markets. In addition, it’s being trialed in 15 new countries (e.g., Czech, Greece, Malaysia, Taiwan, Chile, Brazil).
• A new data center will open in Brazil in 2010. That will make a total of seven data centers throughout the world.
• Every 90 days substantial enhancements are added.

Pricing:

• Hitherto, the bundled mix of Exchange/SharePoint/OCS and Live Meeting was priced at $15/seat/month. The price is now reduced to $10/seat/month. However, there was a semipermanent 30% promotion in place, so the reduction isn’t as material as it might appear.
• Exchange Online Standard has gone from $10/seat/month to $5/seat/month, a big reduction. This will have material impact on competition.
• Office SharePoint Online Standard has gone from $7.25/seat/month to $5.25/seat/month.
• Office Communications Online has gone from $2.50/seat/month to $2/seat/month.
• The Web-browser-only Exchange/SharePoint version is still $3/seat/month.

These online offerings are very strong and very attractive. We continue to be impressed. Sales are still in their very early days. The main competitors for the foreseeable future are:

• On-premises versions of Exchange/SharePoint/OCS
• Cisco and Google

The SaaS offering from IBM/Lotus is some way from being a major threat; we look forward to this situation changing.

… David Ferris

• Can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, or Outlook 2010 as rich client
• Cisco-provided web browser client also available
• Outlook compatibility is extremely high due to reverse engineering of MAP. Eg includes notes, tasks, group scheduling etc. No plugin required
• Has large mailbox: 5GB and 25GB
• Based on PostPath acquisition
• Good anti-spam and anti-virus included (result of IronPort acquisition)
• Support for ActiveSync, Blackberry

Plans are underway to provide a rich, and innovative, integrated suite of collaborative applications. These encompass:

• IM, voice, presence, online meetings, team workspace, social and work directory, social networking, news, blogs
• Web client, Inbox-centric architecture
• Prototypes are in place today; overall vision is evolving

Pricing was not revealed to us and will be announced today. However, note that Exchange Online is now $5/seat/month, and Google Apps either free or a little over $4/seat/month for the Premier Edition.

Currently, Microsoft Exchange dominates corporate email. This needs stiff competition, for the good of everyone. Google Apps may become stiff competition. The market share of on-premises Notes/Domino is gradually shrinking, and the SaaS offerings from IBM/Lotus are not yet strong enough to give Microsoft any grief. We are thus excited by the launch of Cisco WebEx Mail. It has real potential to give Microsoft a hard time. We hope it does: competition is good for all of us.

… David Ferris

Conflicting pressure comes from legal counsel, which wants information to be destroyed as quickly as possible to reduce exposure and the substantial costs of responding to e-discovery requests.

In the fullness of time most organizations will keep almost all of their electronic content (excluding spam, for example) for an arbitrarily long period because of the cheapness of storage, the expense of deleting material, and the value of holding on to material in case it is useful. Retention policies will gradually become less of a burning issue.

… David Ferris

• PSTs and tape backups are still lingering around.
• They are subject to e-discovery, and retrieving information from them can be extremely expensive and disruptive–far more so than with an archiving tool.
• Tapes and PSTs need to be disposed of within the retention window.
• Don’t forget third-party external material; e.g., material at Iron Mountain.
• Tapes should be used for disaster recovery. Recycle them within the retention window.

Many thanks to Metalogix’s Frank Mitchell for a stimulating discussion of this topic.

… David Ferris

It usually makes sense to go ahead with archiving in advance of having decided one’s retention policy; that is, start by archiving everything, for an indeterminate period. You still get many of the advantages of archiving, such as better user mailbox performance, better e-discovery, and reduced backup times. As you go along, you can reduce the scope of archiving (e.g., don’t include spam) and define retention policies.

… David Ferris

The reason I am looking forward to this webinar is the growing controversy that surrounds the new Exchange 2010 and its new archiving capabilities. This is another classic struggle between Microsoft and its third-party independent software vendors. If you believe the early Exchange 2010 messaging, then you may think that Exchange 2010 has full archiving built-in and the third-party products for archiving are not required. But is Microsoft telling us the complete story? Or are they tailoring their message to fit their needs?

What is the truth about full archiving capability and what features are lacking with Exchange 2010?

Good questions. And the answers can be found by attending the webinar.

… Bob Spurzem

(Editor’s note: Forgive the shameless self-promotion!)

However, Microsoft is sometimes overenthusiastic. For example, consider this Microsoft blog, by Julia White, director of Exchange marketing. Speaking of Exchange 2010, she says: “It archives and discovers… At a regional healthcare group, they are able to use the integrated archiving, retention and discovery capabilities of 2010 saving them the cost and maintenance of using third party solutions that resulted in $250,000 they didn’t have to spend – and that was just the first year savings.”

It’s very hard to see how the retention and archiving features of Exchange 2010 could satisfy the compliance requirements of the health care industry, especially in terms of end user involvement. Health care compliance rules require tamper resistant email retention, a requirement that Exchange 2010 does not satisfy.

Of course, a certain degree of hype is to be forgiven in launch copy, which is trying to drum up excitement. The trouble is, Microsoft field personnel will pick up the message and mis-sell Exchange archiving.

If you want to learn more about Exchange 2010 archiving, attend our Wednesday webcast, Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Archiving: The Complementary Role of Third-Party Solutions. It’s on November 4 at 8:30 a.m. Pacific. Go here to register.

Microsoft Response

We asked Microsoft if it would like to comment on this bulletin. Ms. White responded as follows:

“I understand the point you are making and don’t want our field overselling, but the language in this post feels overstated. The customer sited is from our early adopter program and this customer reference data is not exaggerated. I think it is very reasonable to provide clarity about what Exchange 2010 archiving and discover is capable of vs other vendors on the market. And, I think it is fair to make the point about HIPAA compliance and needing more specific functionality than Exchange 2010 will natively provide. But, net/net, the tone of this essentially feels that you’re calling me/MS intentionally misleading which is not correct.

I do think we have a challenge providing clarity about what Exchange archiving offers, what it doesn’t and how our partners extend / compliment the native capabilities. Anytime you have a nuanced technology stack like this, it can be difficult for general sales people. The last thing I want is customers being oversold and then disappointed – that’s not good for anyone. I very much appreciate the feedback in this post and take it to heart. The intention was not to suggest the native Exchange archiving capabilities will solve high-end compliance requirements in healthcare – this was simply quoting an actual customer reference.”

… David Ferris

Exchange 2010 has some important improvements to the dumpster. It now:

• Includes all deleted items from the mailbox, including email, calendars, contacts, and more.
• Is indexed so it can be searched using the new multi-mailbox search tool in Exchange 2010.
• Is extended with new Purges and Versions folders:
  • The Purges folder keeps items that users purge from the dumpster for the length of the dumpster retention period.
  • The Versions folder keeps a copy-on-write snapshot of email that users modify.
  • The Exchange 2010 dumpster still operates with a retention period (14-day default) or custom. The new dumpster features are a welcome addition to Exchange.

By capturing all deleted items and preventing users from purging email, it closes two major “leaks” for email retention and compliance.

… Bob Spurzem

It is very easy to sign up for a Twitter account, and it costs nothing. Each post has a maximum of 140 characters, so the message is very brief. To find a person or brand name to follow, simply search for the name and then click the “follow” button.

I use Twitter to follow the SharePoint brand name. I receive information on events, product changes, and trends. I have found the content in Twitter to be useful in some cases; for example, a link to an interesting article or news about a upcoming event. But the majority of the information I receive is useless.

And therein lies the secret for using Twitter. Always strive to submit content that is meaningful and useful for readers. Who wants to read this real excerpt: “Friday – what do I want to focus on today?”

…Bob Spurzem

DAGs are part of the Exchange 2010 high availability solution which now provides database-level failover. Each Mailbox Database can have up to 16 copies. Exchange will manage the replication of data automatically between the database copies to keep data consistent. Replication is based on the transaction log files, similar to how Exchange 2007 used logs files with LCR, SCR, and CCR, which by the way are discontinued in Exchange 2010. By having multiple copies of each database, traditional Exchange backup is no longer a necessity. Should a hardware failure occur, Exchange can simply mount one of the database copies. According to Microsoft, failover time is less than 30 seconds.

… Bob Spurzem

One reason for its success is the rapid climb of SharePoint as an enterprise content management solution. Organizations are rapidly deploying SharePoint to better manage Office files and this is one reason for the strong interest in how to deploy and manage SharePoint. Second is the strong partner ecosystem that supports SharePoint. Hundreds of partners participated in the event and shared their tips and strategies on improving SharePoint.

SharePoint will continue to drive large audiences. SharePoint is a semi-customizable solution that in some sense depends on the creative sharing of the community to achieve its full potential. It is this active exchange of information that will continue to make SharePoint gatherings a success.

… Bob Spurzem

Email content that exists in offline PST files is imported into the Archive Mailbox via a new PST archive tool that comes with Exchange 2010. The PST Import tool is basic in its initial release, but gets the job done. I recommend you allow time to manually organize PST files first because the PST Archive tool does not include a crawler to go out and find PSTs.

The advantage of moving PST data into the Archive Mailbox is to unclog your file share and desktops. Email content in the Archive Mailbox is centrally managed, protected, and searchable. This eliminates the risk of losing email content in existing PSTs.

If your organization is struggling with PST file overload–as many are–Exchange 2010’s Archive Mailbox will be a big help.

… Bob Spurzem

Imagine if your company and your competitor were both on Google. Now imagine stumbling across your competitor’s inbox. Whoops!

This underscores the importance of security whenever multitenancy is employed for email hosting. And it lends credence to customer concerns to have all their email encrypted when in the cloud.

And while this article applies to Google, the same could happen with Microsoft or any other vendor hosting multiple companies on a common infrastructure.

… David Sengupta

According to ZL Technologies Inc. v. Gartner Group Inc. and Carolyn DiCenzo, ZL Technologies makes allegations of defamation, trade libel, false or misleading advertising, unfair competition, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage against Gartner and Carolyn DiCenzo. ZL Technologies seeks US$1.3B in punitive damages, $396M in damages, and other fees and charges.

You can see the actual suit document itself here. Among other things, it spells out problems with the archiving Magic Quadrant.

Since its inception, Gartner has consistently placed Symantec in the “Leader” quadrant of the MQ. Other archiving vendors such as ZL Technologies have for years struggled to get positive placement on the MQ. Getting placed in the Leader quadrant of the archiving MQ has become somewhat of a holy grail for archiving vendors, with Ms. DiCenzo the gatekeeper. In the suit, ZL outlines the many ways it has tried to convince Gartner that its technology is on par or superior to that of Symantec. According to the filing, “at the core of this action are not only the reckless statements made by Gartner as an influential member of the media, but an economic model championed by [Gartner] that elevates marketing puffery over serious technology.”

Interestingly, Gartner’s bio of Ms. DiCenzo suggests that she left Gartner in August. Whether her departure is connected with this case is unclear; she may have simply retired.

We fully recognize that at Ferris we, too, are analysts. That said, this case illustrates some important points:

• Any analyst firm is simply expressing an opinion, hopefully an educated one.
• No one knows the future. We can only make our best predictions, based on past experience.
• Any analyst vendor rankings need to be transparent concerning the underlying data. How was a decision made, and why?
• The link between monies spent by a vendor with the analyst, and how well the analyst evaluates the vendor and its products, should be minimal. Vendors commonly note that if they spend a day or two educating the Gartner analyst (and paying handsomely for the privilege), they often move to a better position in the MQ.
• Gartner MQs profess to give a quick feeling for how well products compare, in terms of several key indicators, notably excellence of technology and market share. However, when you look closely at them, they don’t really hold up. Given MQ parameters, some products need to appear at two points in the quadrant: Gartner shoehorns them into a single point.
• Customers evaluating vendors should always look at the products themselves, and not rely solely on analyst opinion.
• Bigger is not necessarily better in the analyst world. At Ferris we pride ourselves on years of cumulative and deep experience in the fields we cover, but we’re far smaller than Gartner.

… David Ferris

The likelihood of a successful recovery was put at “extremely low.” This is yet another illustration of risks inherent in cloud services.

If you are a provider of cloud services, it’s paramount that you assess the end-to-end redundancy. Are SANs backed up? Are your data centers drawing from multiple power grids?

If you are considering cloud services, take heed. Ask your cloud services vendor to demonstrate how its systems are redundant. Ensure service-level agreements (SLAs) are signed with monetary penalties for unattained SLAs. And make sure your cloud vendors will be around when you need them.

… David Sengupta and Bob Spurzem

One of the primary concerns of any enterprise considering an outsourced solution such as Exchange Online, Outlook Live, or Google Apps is around the security of the data that will end up hosted in the cloud by Microsoft, Google, or another hosting provider. Email encryption is an important priority for early movers considering the cloud. It all comes down to trust. Companies don’t all trust the hosting vendors with their sensitive business data. And even if they trust the vendor, legislation is still evolving, and no company wants to risk its data being subpoenaed directly from the hosting provider without their consent.

The solution, then, is to encrypt all data stored in the cloud. This requires an encryption mechanism such as a Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) gateway at the perimeter between the customer premises and the cloud, or other mechanism. The infrastructure employed needs to be robust enough to decrypt data prior to being sent to partners and other email recipients. And in certain scenarios we foresee partnering companies to choose the same cloud services provider in order to take advantage of a federated cloud model in which all email remains encrypted when sent between partners, and never leaves the data center.

As a result, cloud solutions providers that master encryption early–and in a manner that is simple to implement–will have an important competitive strength.

… David Sengupta

This strategy is flawed. Many organizations are evaluating hosted messaging, and cloud computing in general; e.g., Microsoft Exchange Online, Outlook Live, Google Apps. Customers want a back-out plan in case things go wrong, or in case the service provider doesn’t deliver the quality of experience customers need. After all, email is the lifeblood of the enterprise, in many cases. And giving customers the standard answer of, “We’ll export your mailboxes to PST if you need to bail out,” is lame. Handing a customer terabytes or petabytes of PSTs isn’t anything more than a tail-light warranty.

I predict that solution providers who offer an easy, automated way for customers to migrate off hosted messaging–back to an on-premises solution or to another hosting provider–will end up with a substantial competitive advantage. This may be counterintuitive, but giving customers a way out is key to buyer confidence.

Customers want to be confident that whatever cloud solution they select will be there for them, regardless of the weather. No one likes the feeling of being trapped, and knowing that getting out is just as easy as getting in will reduce friction for customers who really just want to cut costs and reduce complexity. Excellence and cost-efficiency in outsourced messaging services should stand alone as drivers for choosing to move to the cloud. And everyone will benefit.

David Sengupta

Outlook “Quick Steps” can be accessed from a Quick Access Toolbar that sits at the top of the main Outlook 2010 workspace. Default Quick Steps in the Technology Preview (which may change in the final shipping version of Outlook 2010) include “To Manager,” “Forward: FYI,” “Meeting Reply,” “Team E-Mail: Reply & Delete,” and “Team Meeting.” Users can also create their own Quick Steps; for example, “Move to PST” or “Ignore Conversation.” So you can create a one-click rule in order to opt out of any conversation thread that you don’t care to get in your inbox, and either have those automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder, or have them moved to another folder or a PST. Being able to triage email faster, and in bulk, provides a substantial productivity boost to the typical knowledge worker who is spending hours every day sifting through email.

Outlook 2010 also includes a “Clean Up” feature that will automatically triage any redundant copies of messages in a conversation thread. For example, if there have been 15 emails in a particular thread, most of these emails will be represented in the last email in the thread, so all of the original messages can be cleaned up–either by deletion, archival, or other action as defined by the end user. In some ways this is similar to the old thread compressor add-in. In environments that are particularly chatty, Clean Up can cut down the email in a particular inbox by between 25% and 50%, reducing the number of clicks spent triaging email, and ultimately reducing the amount of time a user needs to spend cleaning up his or her inbox.

Finally, Outlook 2010 inherits a feature of Office 2010 called “Paste Options.” Simply put, Paste Options allow you to define how “Paste” will function in various applications. Historically, copying and pasting into Outlook has not provided much control over the format of the copied data. Copying from a Web site into an email message, for example, generally resulted in inconsistent formatting in the email, which needed to be cleaned up. Similar issues arose when copying from another email or from an Office document. The net result was time wasted editing emails prior to sending, just to ensure that font size and types were consistent throughout. Paste Options allow you to choose from several predefined options, namely:

• Keep Source Formatting
• Merge Formatting
• Keep Text Only

Any one of these can further be set as the default paste action:

• Within the same email
• Pasting between emails
• Pasting between emails when style definitions conflict
• Pasting from other programs

Users can even set default paste actions for pictures (e.g., paste in line with text, in front of text, behind text, etc.) Paste Options functionality, then, results in substantial time savings for end users who do a lot of copy and pasting into email.

We find that Outlook 2010 provides over 10% increased efficiency in time spent in email. Taken across a company of any size, and set against the inordinate amount of time the average worker spends in email, Outlook’s productivity enhancements may well represent the most compelling return on investment inherent in all of Microsoft Office 2010.

… David Sengupta

It’s hard to believe that a major city like Boston is not aware of its obligation to preserve email, but that seems to be the case. No matter; a state judge has issued an order for Boston to change its practice immediately. It was not mentioned what fines or penalties will be levied as a result of the lawsuit, but the violations can incur a fine of up to $500 or a prison sentence of up to one year.

Email archiving needs to be taken seriously by Boston and every other government agency in the United States.

…Bob Spurzem

This year’s SharePoint show promises to be exciting for two reasons. First, we will learn about the next major release of SharePoint 2010 due in the first half of 2010. Second, we will have a chance to speak with all the SharePoint partners and see their new products and services.

I will be attending the show and will report back.

…Bob Spurzem

As interest in cloud computing continues to grow, more and more vendors are turning to managed service providers (MSPs) as a channel to reach hosted messaging customers. eFolder has historically provided white-labeled backup and archiving solutions to MSPs wishing to offer hosted cloud-based backup or hosted archiving solutions for customers. It runs a network of secure private cloud data centers. Similar vendors include Asigra, Mozy, and Carbonite.

eFolder customers typically deploy an appliance that connects to the cloud for backup and archiving purposes. The addition of DoubleCheck Email Manager provides eFolder with another appliance offering that performs email hygiene and policy enforcement. Indications are that eFolder will merge the technologies into a unified monitoring and management interface.

This acquisition paves the way for eFolder to provide simple, end-to-end encryption for customers wishing to move their backups and email archives to eFolder’s cloud. As we have written previously, security of hosted data–be that email or email archives–is a major concern preventing many customers from moving to the cloud. Having an on-premises appliance gateway could provide an elegant yet simple solution to give these customers the encryption they want in a simple manner. Obviously eFolder also has the added benefit of cross-selling into the thousands of DoubleCheck customers that have come along with this acquisition.

David Sengupta

Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the hit from native support for low-cost storage. And geoclustering vendors will be impacted by mailbox replication technologies now in the box.

The most significant change is that Exchange 2010 facilitates cloud services. Web-based self service capabilities, high availability, and deeper web services support all enable Exchange in the cloud.

The big question is whether Exchange 2010 will see a spike in adoption. Exchange 2007 deployments have been less than stellar.

Hats go off to the Exchange team on this major release.

…David Sengupta

According to this BBC article, one of the speech-to-text conversion companies–Spinvox–has been found to convert voicemail messages using human operators instead of “advanced speech recognition software.” Patent filings by Spinvox reveal the depth of human involvement. Spinvox’s valuation has dropped 90% since this news has gotten out.

Plenty of such vendors do the same thing. Their contracts include fine print about being able to open messages for “quality control purposes.” They don’t state that in fact every message is indeed opened for quality control and editing.

The problem for the speech-to-text industry is that its automatic technology, while evolving rapidly, can’t do near-perfect translation. The human involvment means that users of speech-to-text have to live with numerous typos and other misinterpretations.

In the case of vendors like Spinvox, a shell game had emerged whereby vendors were trying to get ahead of the pack by employing vast teams of “editors” in Pakistan and other countries. No one knows how long this will have to continue, until automated technology is good enough. Thus many speech-to-text companies have had to maintain these pools of human assistants–along with the associated cost burdens–for an indefinite time. As a result, some companies have been bleeding cash.

In a sense, employing human editors would seem to be an innovative and useful approach. But sometimes this simply leads to everyone playing the same game. All the spin quickly leads to an overinflated market and things crash.

Customers would be wise to read through the fine print of vendor claims if they are using speech-to-text services such as that of Spinvox. At the end of the day, if customers are happy with the service, and fine with the security risks of having people halfway around the globe reading your email, it’s not necessarily the end of the world to have your voicemails transcribed to text and sent to you in under a minute.

…David Sengupta

Most DLP vendors have now been acquired. Eg McAfee bought Reconnex in 8/08, RSA/EMC bought Tablus in 8/07, Websense bought PortAuthority in 1/07. The market’s been rather disappointing: DLP revenues have been much lower than expected.

…David Ferris

Before we share our perspectives, we’d like to hear your first impressions … respond to this blog once you have kicked the tires on this new version of Exchange Server!

… David Sengupta

This confirms that a possible port from the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) to SQL has not simply been a rumor, while leaving the door open for future post-Exchange 2010 releases to use a SQL store. As noted in one of the reader comments, and I well remember, hot discussions around ESE vs. SQL have been a part of most major Exchange events going back at least to MEC98 in Boston. Microsoft does not typically make major development investments with no reason, so one has to wonder if this is indeed a statement of future direction — to invest in ESE and forget about SQL — or simply an attempt to manage expectations around Exchange 2010? We suspect the latter.

Many factors can influence such a major technology decision in a product release cycle — ranging from technology integration hurdles, scope/schedule/cost factors, possible political challenges between the Exchange and SQL teams, and overall prioritization set against other features, to mention a few. Did the port to SQL simply not make the cut for Exchange 2010? Or was there too much risk in making such sweeping changes in a single release?

One of Microsoft’s top priorities in Exchange 2010 has obviously been to enable Exchange Online in several overarching ways, namely:

• To let Microsoft use Exchange 2010 in its data centers to facilitate better operational efficiency (and ultimately to compete with the likes of Google).
• To let customers choose to move from on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online and to provide some migration tools in the box to do so.

Meeting the first of these objectives has necessitated substantial back-end investments around database portability, site level resiliency, and other high-availability features. Making such extensive changes combined with changing the database itself would impose a massive amount of risk into the Exchange code base, and would have been a factor for the decision.

But it’s interesting to note that a number of changes have been made in Exchange 2010 to isolate the store from other components. For example, the introduction of MAPI in the Middle Tier (MoMT) serves to isolate Outlook client calls from going directly to the back-end database, which would have posed a serious problem or become a blocking issue for Outlook clients (which are largely MAPI-dependent) if a move to SQL was planned. So why did Microsoft invest in technologies such as MoMT? Enabling more database portability for cloud computing is obviously one part of the equation, but is there more at play here?

While it would have been nice to have a definitive statement that SQL won’t ever be a back end to Exchange, that sort of long-term roadmap is hard to predict in the technology world, and Microsoft did well to buy itself some breathing room with the “we continue to evaluate technology options” comment — which is the right thing to say — so the rumors will continue to swirl.

And based on the timing — Microsoft is probably in the planning stages of Exchange “15,” the next version of Exchange after Exchange 2010 — we suspect Microsoft wrote this statement to spawn some discussion on the whole debate and gauge demand for a move to SQL. If this is something you feel passionate about, we’d like to hear from you. The ESE vs. SQL argument is not quite ready to die yet.

… David Sengupta

• Quest is discontinuing its eDiscovery module
• There will be no additional development on the Archive Manager product
• It is not clear, though, that the MAPI-based stubbing offering will be completely discontinued: at least not yet. Quest pulled itself out of the running for a very large opportunity where they had the inside track, so it’s probably only a matter of time

Generally, Quest’s archiving offering has not been as visible as you’d expect, given Quest’s status. Perhaps that supports the rumor.

Can anyone else advise on this? If you want anonymity, email david.ferris@ferris.com and let us know you want anonymity.

… David Ferris

• Allows users to send and receive encrypted emails.
• Normally users have some special software installed on their machine. This works with almost all email clients including Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc.
• An invitation system is being developed. If you send to a user who hasn’t got the client software installed, the recipient will get an email that asks him or her to sign up and download the client software, so the parties can communicate privately.
• Focus is on selling to SMBs, and organizations subject to privacy regulations such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, accounting, legal, government, law enforcement, and defense.
• A free version is available; a professional version gets you more functionality, including access to compliance reports on what emails have been sent, to whom, when, and so on.
• The current offering uses a WebLOQ-hosted server. In the future, a customer-premises-based server version will also be available.

Company:

• Founded 2004.
• Privately held. Ferris Research estimates annual revenues at less than $1M.
• Series A funding in 2006 of $1M.
• Series B funding in 2007 of $4.5M.
• Now contemplating additional funding of $5M to $10M.

Comments:

• WebLOQ sees compliance as the driver for purchases. Probably right.
• Over the last 10 years, many similar end-to-end email encryption solutions have been implemented. They have received little acceptance. Based on a short briefing, it’s hard to see why WebLOQ should fare better at this point.
• Interestingly, the solution doesn’t have tight integration with specific email clients. Instead, you email to a special address. The email is then intercepted as it goes out or comes in, and is duly encrypted/decrypted.
• More than email bodies and attachments are encrypted. All email headers, including recipient lists and subject lines, are encrypted. That’s unusual, and could be valuable for some.
• Recipients who don’t have the plug-in software can’t view messages, even through a staging server. This seems a pity.

… David Ferris

In this case, the judge issued a statement asking for all email records pertaining to the case, no matter where they are located or if they exist at all. The judge is clearly displaying frustration caused by the defendant, who is unclear on the whereabouts of the email in question. The judge goes on to say if the email cannot be found, then she will issue an adverse judgment and dismiss the case.

All this means that email record keeping is very serious business, and if you rely on backup tapes, you are likely to find your company in the same messy situation as this case. Email archiving is the obvious solution for preserving email for company records and legal discovery.

… David Ferris

We’d like to hear from you. According to the Cyber-Ark survey referenced by the USA Today article, “74% of the 200 information technology pros surveyed know how to circumvent security to access sensitive data, and 35% admitted doing so without permission.” Is this consistent with your experience? Has your company been hit with “spy bugs” such as the UHF-transmitting USB cable, pen listening devices, or other bugs? At Ferris we have provided in-depth coverage around data leak protection (DLP) systems and email security, but would like to get a sense of how widespread these “spy bug” experiences have been among our readers.

Please reply to this post or send an e-mail to david.ferris@ferris.com if you wish to remain anonymous.

… David Sengupta

If you have experience with EV, please share your views on it. To do so, please post your response to the following survey questions as a comment. Or, if you want anonymity, send your response to david.ferris@ferris.com: we’ll post your response without identifying you or your organization.

Many thanks–David Ferris

Q1. What do you think are EV’s greatest strengths?

Q2. What do you think are EV’s greatest weaknesses?

Q3. What is your overall satisfaction with EV?

• Very Dissatisfied
• Somewhat Dissatisfied
• Somewhat Satisfied
• Very Satisfied
• No Opinion

Q4. How likely are you to continue using or repurchase EV?

• Definitely Not
• Probably Not
• Probably Will
• Definitely Will
• No Opinion
• Not Applicable–we don’t use EV

Q5. Rough # people in your organization/company?

Q6. What is your name (optional), title and what are your job responsibilities?

Q7. What type of business/industry is your organization in?

Q8. Do you have any other comments?

Metalogix Archiving Express for SharePoint is a free tool. It provides hardware-independent hierarchical storage management and easy installation. No support is included beyond a user forum.

At a later time, Metalogix will introduce a for-fee version with more bells and whistles. In the meantime, it hopes the free version will help build its name and market share.

Comments:

• SharePoint needs archiving. Some major reasons are:
  • User performance suffers as the volume of content grows. Offloading to an archive ameliorates the situation.
  • Various regulations require archiving for document recovery.
  • Makes backups and restores easier for administrators and eats up less of their time.

… David Ferris

• Professional Archive Manager. Provides archiving for SharePoint, Exchange, and file systems (products acquired from H&S in September 2008).
• Archiving Express for Sharepoint & Files. Free, full version of the preceding.
• Site Migration Manager. Migrates older SharePoint sites to newer versions.
• eRoom Migration Manager. Migrates eRoom data to SharePoint.
• Stellent Migration Manager. Migrates Stellent (now Oracle Content Server) data to SharePoint.
• WebSite Migration Manager. A general-purpose tool to migrate ECM or Web content to SharePoint.
• Selective Restore Manager Pro. Restores individual SharePoint documents and list items from backups without a recovery farm.

The company is privately held. We estimate revenues at $8M annually. It recently raised $40M, some of which was used to acquire H&S’s archiving technology in September 2008.

Comments:

• Microsoft sees SharePoint as a central location for collaborative information.
• However, SharePoint is still at a very early stage of development, and has many very rough edges.
• A third-party ecosystem is consequently evolving. Vendors include AvePoint, Colligo, Metalogix, and Quest.
• Archiving and backup are areas of pain for today’s SharePoint users.

… David Ferris

At the recent TechEd, a Microsoft instructor introduced personal archives as a means to reduce primary mailbox size and circumvent quotas without losing organizational control. In effect, personal archives are a new replacement for PST files.

Personal archives are part of Exchange Server and are associated with an existing primary mailbox. Email can be moved from a primary to an archive mailbox using policies. Users access both primary and archive mailboxes side-by-side via Outlook and OWA.

The main functions you get from a personal archive are:

• Basic message retention (Move-to-Archive Policy; Delete Policy; Hold Policy)
• No single instance storage
• Simple role-based access (e.g., so auditors can view user mailboxes)
• Basic keyword and metadata-based search across mailboxes, typically via browser
• Bulk PST import/export from file share; no PST crawler

Organizational archiving goes beyond the scope of personal archiving and delivers full mailbox capture for all users, full single-instance storage across all data, and advanced search and case management tools for e-discovery.

By way of comparison, a typical third-party email archival solution can be expected to deliver all or a portion of the following key functions:

• Logs, WORM, read only
• Single instancing/compression
• Configuration auditing
• Mailbox auditing
• Journaling metadata
• Rogue admin protection
• Regulatory accreditation
• Protected content (signing/encryption)
• Federated discovery, retention, and reporting across content
• Data mining and visualization
• Case management and advanced e-discovery
• Archive for Bloomberg data and other non-Microsoft IM data
• Monitoring and supervisory tools
• Archive for files and SharePoint

In effect, Microsoft is positioning the new archiving features in Exchange 2010 for personal archiving and leaving the door open for third-party solutions to deliver more advanced feature necessary for organizational archiving. Small organizations will find the basic features of Exchange 2010 satisfactory to reduce the strain on storage growth and eliminate PST files. But for organizations that require full email retention and advanced e-discovery, a third-party email archiving solution is the answer for the next few years.

… Bob Spurzem

• 2009 revenues: $650M
• 2010 revenues: $780M
• 2011 revenues: $940M
• 2012 revenues: $1,125M
• 2013 revenues: $1,350m

We estimate that the current market leader, Symantec/Enterprise Vault, is doing about $325M annually. That probably amounts for half of industry revenues.

All comments welcomed–please post them below.

… David Ferris

• The archiving features of Exchange 2010 require enterprise CALs. If you are not already using enterprise CALs, then you must pay the additional cost to upgrade.
• To use Exchange 2010 archiving, you must also upgrade to Office 2010. This will ship six to nine months AFTER Exchange 2010 ships. This will add a significant cost to an organization that has Office 2007 deployed and does not wish to upgrade all of its desktop machines. Without Office 2010, you can’t leverage the archive functionality.

… Bob Spurzem

Cemaphore’s core expertise has been around MAPI-based synchronization technologies, historically focused on its MailShadow continuous replication product. Over recent months Cemaphore has expanded its offerings to include synchronization between on-premises Exchange and both Google Apps and Microsoft’s Exchange Online offerings. Client-side and server-side solutions exist.

Sparxent has been focused on providing IT solutions for the midmarket, spanning software, hardware, and IT consulting. Previous acquisitions by Sparxent have included NetworkD, Arbyte Group, and XAware.

Sparxent’s focus on the midmarket goes after an attractive, massive, and underserved market segment. However, it is too early to see how and if Sparxent’s offerings and capabilities as a company will be able to gain the volume they need in this market to become a significant player. And it will be interesting to see what happens to the MailShadow family of products within Sparxent.

… David Sengupta

There are basically three ways to improve the compute performance of an IT platform:

• Increase the clock speed of the processor.
• Increase the number of processors–”scale up.”
• Increase the number of computers (processor/s + memory pairs)–”scale out.”

The above, of course, assumes that there is sufficient memory (RAM) to keep the processor/s busy, and sufficient I/O bandwidth to keep memory full. The former is the reason that the next release of Windows Server (Windows Server 2008 R2) will be available only in 64-bit versions.

As we discussed in an earlier posting (A Subtle Change to Microsoft Server Pricing), increasing clock speed is no longer a practical possibility, because doing so requires too much power and generates too much heat.

Processor manufacturers have responded to this limitation by increasing the number of processors that fit on a processor chip (scaling up), and this is a trend that will continue. Hardware system manufacturers have responded by increasing the number of processor chips (CPU packages) that can be plugged into a system (scaling up). This is relatively cheap to achieve when only a small number (2-4) of processor chips plug directly into a motherboard, but becomes much more expensive once a larger number of processor chips need to be supported.

Unfortunately, figuring out how to support a large number of processors at the hardware level and preventing contention for memory (RAM) from massively degrading performance deals with only part of the problem. Unless the OS can keep a large number of threads active, the expense of assembling systems with a large number of processors would be wasted. Historically, OSs have had difficulty doing this, largely because of their need to sequentialize access to data structures. It is often the case that a large number of processors are idle while waiting to access a dispatcher (thread to processor binder) data structure.

In Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft has achieved a major breakthrough: It has developed a lock-less dispatcher. This does not at a stroke eliminate lock contention (for example, to a database record, etc.), but it does mean that contention will not now occur at the most basic level of the OS. It is for this reason that we feel comfortable stating that Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 will “scale up” with a vengeance.

If systems can “scale up,” why bother to “scale out”? The answer is cost. A “scaled out” cluster of inexpensive computers is much, much cheaper than a single massively (>16 processors) “scaled up” system. What is more, systems can “scale out” from a hardware standpoint, effectively without limit, while “scale up” hardware is always restricted in the maximum number processors that a particular configuration can support. So what’s the catch?

The answer is software. In general, applications can only be “scaled out” when they can be broken up into an unlimited number of instances that run without interaction with each other–a so-called “shared nothing” application. A good example is an application that serves up Web content, either static or dynamic. Another, rather surprising application, is an Oracle database cluster. Neither Microsoft’s SQL Server nor IBM’s DB2 (UDB variant) are “shared nothing” systems, and are therefore, not amenable to “scaled out” deployment.

… Nick Shelness

Quick Summary:

• SaaS team workspace.
• To give you a general idea, think of a souped-up/Web 2.0 Wiki or bulletin board. My colleague Steve Kille aptly called it a “bulletin board on steroids” under the hood.
• Currently in an early state of development.
• Google wants to get developers to integrate with Google Wave. This presentation was to encourage them to start writing Wave applications.
• Expect general availability in perhaps mid-2010. As noted, this is still early-stages code.
• Main features currently:
  • Post messages and responses to them–build extensive conversations.
  • People can concurrently work on documents.
  • Send instant messages.
  • Post photos and videos.
  • Built-in access controls.
• Highly interactive.
• Support for mobile clients, with more limited user interfaces, is anticipated.
• There’s a very nice ability to see how conversations have evolved, step by step.
• Works with external workflows.

Application Platform:

• Many third-party integrated applications are anticipated.
• Google wants Wave to be open and interoperable. To this end, it will:
  • Publish a rich set of protocols and APIs.
  • Generally make it easy for third parties to write their own Wave servers and clients.
  • Make Google’s Wave implementation available as open source software.

You can see the main presentation here. It runs for 80 minutes; it’s worthwhile if you’re interested in SharePoint/teamspace style collaboration.

Comments:

• Wave has big potential to provide shared workspaces.
• Google presents Google Wave as a more modern alternative to email. It’s an exciting and attractive technology, but one that I think is more of an alternative to SharePoint and team workspaces in general.
• It has some very important advantages over SharePoint, some of which are its openness and user- and developer-friendliness.
• The ability to concurrently edit live documents (rather than the traditional ECM approach of checkin/checkout) is very attractive.
• It appears relatively easy to build third-party, tightly integrated applications.
• Several extremely attractive applications were demonstrated, including:
  • An intelligent context-sensitive spell checker. For example, it can choose between the correct versions of “been” and “bean”; or change “Icland” to “Iceland” or “island” depending on what’s appropriate.
  • A very nice on-the-fly language translator. The demo showed English/French; 40 languages are supported in all.
• Notably, it currently lacks group calendaring. Presumably this can be fixed before too long.
• Notably, it currently lacks good support for the posting of email items. That’s a harder problem, as SharePoint’s poor email system illustrates.
• Emails will be important elements of Wave spaces. Google should show natural and easy ways of posting and using them.
• There are various types of access controls. It’s unclear at this point how well they will serve corporate needs.

… David Ferris

The email wave was followed by the instant messaging wave, which has taken a similar path, coming approximately five years behind the email wave. Until several years ago, instant messaging was just something for young people to use, but not a serious technology for the enterprise. While parts of Europe and much of Asia still see instant messaging in this way, enterprise instant messaging and presence solutions such as Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), IBM Sametime, and Cisco Jabber have become a very real part of corporate messaging deployments throughout North America. Companies use instant messaging extensively for back-channel chats and for quick communications in lieu of email, and presence-enablement is starting to find its way into business applications.

We see social networking technologies as the third such wave, following the instant messaging wave by another five years. Currently most enterprise IT departments view social networking as a consumer application — essentially as a “toy” from a corporate perspective — though we are starting to see companies paying attention to Facebook, Twitter, and similar technologies. Whether trying to provide 140-character tweets to a rapidly growing audience, updating one’s Facebook status via a BlackBerry client, or simply networking through LinkedIn. We expect social networking technologies for the enterprise to start appearing in familiar applications, and social networking connectors like that announced by Virgin Mobile several months ago to increase in prominence. And we expect the evolution of social networking technologies to become mainstream in the enterprise within three to five years.

Our recommendation, then, is that companies should be planning ahead when it comes to compliance, data leak protection, and overall manageability around social networking technologies over the coming few years. We are seeing many organizations block (or attempt to block) popular social networking sites today, but expect this will only be a temporary phase in many cases, giving way to certain subsets of business-related social networking technologies as they emerge and are proven to add value to business.

… David Sengupta

When it launched the Microsoft-branded version of the service, it was named Exchange Hosted Services (EHS). At the time, we said this was confusing, because:

1. It sounded as though it was a hosted Exchange service, rather than hosted services for your existing Exchange installation.
2. The services weren’t only for Exchange; they still worked with Notes/Domino and other email systems.
3. There was no recognition of Microsoft’s overarching security brand: Forefront.

Microsoft has now addressed these issues. The security components of EHS are now known as Forefront Online Security for Exchange.

It’s only taken four years. The typical perils of a large, siloed company.

… Richi Jennings

Free for Google Apps Premier and Education customers, the Google Apps Connector will provide near-instant push of Gmail messages to end-user BlackBerry devices, over-the-air synch or read/deleted status, synch of folders with Gmail labels, one-way (Google to BlackBerry) calendaring synch based on Google Calendar, Contacts synch, and offline e-mail access. Unsupported features include labels and mailbox search. The connector is installed on a BES server within the customer environment.

We believe this to be a major step for Google, however the lack of mailbox search and the unidirectional calendar synch will be an issue for many customers. Google will need to respond quickly with support for these features if it is to gain much traction in the mid- and larger-sized enterprise arena. The July release will be adequate for small businesses that have a dependency on BlackBerry devices, and should open the door for larger-sized organizations to start taking a serious look at Google Apps as a contender for hosted messaging and collaboration.

… David Sengupta

There are two products:

Clearswift Email Appliance:

• Software product, sometimes sold as appliance
• Usually runs in VMware virtualized environment
• Main functions:
  • Policy-based scanning and control
  • Policy-based encryption (can use third-party encryption)
  • Virus control (can use one or more third party virus control services)
  • Spam control (either from Clearswift or third parties)
  • Image control
• Basic content scanning algorithm: boolean logic on metadata and regular expressions, managed list lookups
• Scans emails at Internet boundary; for MS Exchange also scans internal traffic

Clearswift Web Appliance:

• Software product, sometimes sold as appliance
• Usually runs in VMware virtualized environment
• Main functions:
  • URL category time and quota browsing controls
  • Malware and spyware suppression
  • Controls content written to webmail services, blogs and wikis
  • Multi-language profanity, business and compliance terms checks
  • Supports FTP over HTTP, HTTP & HTTPS/SSL
• Lexical keyword and regular expressions scans for searching for credit card (PCI) and social/national security number data (PII), customer defined phrases or using prebuilt dictionaries over all web traffic
• Outgoing and ingoing material is fully inspected before being transmitted onwards

Typical pricing:

• 2,000 seats for email and web appliance, recommended retail price inclusive of 24×5 telephone helpline support and all components:
  • Virtual Web Appliance including HTTPS; anti-virus; URL filter; anti-spyware and MIMEsweeper content control costs $43,800 for a perpetual license and the first year’s support; support from year 2 onwards is $24,090 annually
  • Virtual Email Appliance including anti-spam; anti-virus and MIMEsweeper content control costs $32,100 for a perpetual license and the first year’s support; support from year 2 onwards is $16,080 annually
• Ie, a total of about $26 annually on the basis of three-year costs

Competitive Position:

• Main competitors are Cisco/Ironport for email filtering, Websense for web filtering
• Company believes its main competitive strengths are:
  • Same technology behind email and web filtering, so unified administrator and user experience
  • Underlying technology is independent of type of electronic material, can work on many types of data structure
  • Production-ready support for virtualized environments (VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V)

Company:

• Privately held. Ferris Research estimates revenues at $15M to $20M annually
• CEO Richard Turner says that after a period of flat or declining revenue, GAAP sales for the year ending April 5, 2009 were 10% up on the prior 12 months
• Has been refining its sales messages. Focus now is to sell business solutions rather than technology
• 90% of sales are through channel: goal is to have 100% through channel
• Around 60% of revenues come from email scanning, the balance from the web appliance
• Has recently had major drive to reduce costs

Comments:

• With today’s content control technology, policy-setting is usually in IT hands. In principal, it makes much more sense to put this in the hands of qualified users. CONTENTsafe is recently shipping technology that lets users say “This is sensitive,” and then the system tries to define corresponding policy. Plus users can determine when to end-of-life the policy. Sounds like a very good idea
• No support for instant messaging today
• Image control is a hard problem. Eg it’s easy to confuse skin tones with kitchen cupboards, so you get many false positives or false negatives. 90% accuracy represents the state-of-the-art today
• Clearswift’s MIMEsweeper is the core of the offering. MIMEsweeper is a pioneer in the field of content control, and echoes of it are found in many competing products
• MIMEsweeper has suffered by being acquired by several organizations over the last ten years. Hopefully the changes over the last two years have refocused the company

… David Ferris

1. Sell software, in volume, at about 20% of the incumbents’ prices.
2. Engage third-party developers.
3. Use industry-standard hardware.

These have clearly been the three keys to success for Microsoft — although we can argue the details of how revisionist this description of Bill Gates’ strategy is.

It’s also clear that Microsoft sees SaaS — if you insist, cloud computing — as an important part of its future business. For example:

• Exchange/SharePoint Online (Business Productivity Online Suite or BPOS)
• Exchange Hosted Services — including the Forefront Online Security for Exchange offering
• The Azure Services Platform

So this poses a problem for Microsoft. On the one hand, it’s important for it to sell its products for far less than its incumbent competition. On the other hand, the SaaS/cloud incumbents such as Google, Amazon, and Symantec use platforms that are less expensive to run at scale than Windows.

There’s no way that Microsoft can compete on price in these markets. Don’t expect Microsoft to repeat its previous successes by undercutting its rivals.

… Richi Jennings, with thanks to Microsoft’s Bob Muglia for the succinct description of Microsoft’s strategy

We see this as a critical move by Microsoft to achieve better integration among Exchange, SharePoint, and OCS as these products play an increasingly intertwined role in serving organizations communications and collaboration platforms, and as the same set of products gain prominence in Business Productivity Online Suite as a part of Microsoft Online.

Congratulations to DelBene, and to Microsoft for recognizing the importance of aligning these R&D organizations more closely as Unified Communications and Collaboration play an increasingly critical role in customer organizations.

… David Sengupta

The subtext was that Microsoft was encountering concern (pushback?) from organizations about both the security of data held in Microsoft Online services, and the security of the services themselves. Stated another way, organizations appear to want to apply the same analysis to cloud-delivered services that they apply to on-premise-delivered services. We cannot believe that these concerns are unique to Microsoft, and are therefore an issue that will have to be addressed by all providers of cloud-based services and associated cloud-based data storage.

In an earlier posting, Microsoft Online: Security Issues, we addressed Microsoft’s compliance with standards and conventions as a means of convincing organizations of the security of its cloud-based services and cloud-held data. In this posting, we address another approach of which we became aware during the presentation.

Microsoft is offering two variants of its Online services:

• Standard
• Dedicated

The Standard offering is delivered by Microsoft from multitenanted server platforms controlled and managed by Microsoft. An organization adds/deletes/configures users using a Web-based “Administration Center.” In the case of Exchange Online, at least, some features of on-premise Exchange 2007 are missing. Namely, Public Folders, and IMAP and POP3 support.

The Dedicated offering is delivered by Microsoft from a dedicated, virtual server, platform/s controlled and managed by the customer. When employing a Dedicated offering, an organization is merely migrating its on-premise systems from its own data center/s to Microsoft data center/s, and no features are missing.

In previous briefings on BPOS, Microsoft had made no mention of these twin offerings. As noted in our earlier posting, this move by Microsoft seems to reflect significant pushback from organizations about replacing their on-premise systems with multitenanted cloud-based services.

… Nick Shelness

The subtext was that Microsoft was encountering concern (pushback?) from organizations about both the security of data held in Microsoft Online services, and the security of the services themselves. Stated another way, organizations appear to want to apply the same analysis to cloud-delivered services that they apply to on-premise-delivered services. We cannot believe that these concerns are unique to Microsoft, and are therefore an issue that will have to be addressed by all providers of cloud-based services and associated cloud-based data storage.

Based on the specifics of this briefing, it would appear that Microsoft is attempting to answer these concerns in a structured fashion, as opposed to responding to specific queries. Its approach is to adhere to a set of standards and conventions, and where appropriate, submit its data centers and services to third-party audit and/or certification of adherence.

Among the relevant standards and conventions are the following:

• EU Data – Safe Harbor Framework. Compliance claimed by Microsoft.
• ISO/IEC 27001:2005. Compliance certified by British Standards Institute (BSI) Management Systems America.
• SAS 70 Type II. Third-party audits claimed by Microsoft.

What remains to be seen is whether this will be sufficient to satisfy organizations of the security of Microsoft’s cloud-based offerings, and if they are, what other vendors in this space (Google, Amazon, IBM, etc.) will do to achieve a similar outcome.

… Nick Shelness

• Synchronizes email, calendar, contact information.
• Synchronizes over the air using Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol.
• No need for the additional cost and complexity of BES servers.
• No need for the RIM BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
• Consumers synching with a POP/IMAP mailbox don’t need the BlackBerry Internet Service.
• In addition to Exchange Server, works with MailSite Fusion, CommuniGate Pro, Zimbra, Scalix, FirstClass, and Kerio MailServer.
• No Outlook plugins required.
• Software download to BlackBerry required.
• $49/user/year; volume discounts apply.

… David Ferris

• Long-term, Exchange should be largely independent of the types of storage it uses.
• Long-term, Exchange stores should be of arbitrary size, without sacrificing performance.
• About 80% of Exchange users don’t have archiving. Microsoft’s archiving will seek to address the (simpler) needs of this market for the foreseeable future.
• Exchange archiving will gradually grow in sophistication. As it does, the market for third-party archiving solutions will slowly diminish.
• However, there will probably be a long-term need for specialized archiving solutions from partners.
• Short-term, Microsoft’s archiving solution won’t meet the needs of today’s buyers of archiving, who have pressing storage management, compliance, and e-discovery problems that are best addressed by third-party tools.
• Short-term, Microsoft’s archiving solution will meet the needs of many new types of archiving buyers, who have lesser storage management, compliance, and e-discovery problems.

Storage management, and the need to keep Exchange stores as small as possible, is a very pressing, practical issue. Nevertheless, we are inclined to think that Microsoft is right to adopt the first two bullet points above. The company has worked hard, and continues to do so, to improve Exchange I/O and scalability. Major investments were made in E2007 and E2010 in this regard. In principle, it’s clunky and undesirable to have to yank out message store content and put it into separate repositories, for the sake of performance.

… David Ferris

From an IT perspective, the following points are salient:

• Although the matter is currently active, the email in question dates back to 2005. This raises the issue of email retention and accessibility. Are you able to retrieve email that is years old? In this case the IT staff was asked to retrieve email that was over four years old.
• IT does not get input into the matter. Legally, the email was asked for, and it is IT’s job to find it. IT needs to work with its organization’s policy committee on such issues as email retention, so there is clear understanding of how long email is to be saved and the cost to retrieve it.
• Should the email not be found, as is the situation in this case, then the judge can issue an adverse judgment. This basically tells the jury that they can assume the worst because key email has been obviously destroyed to protect those being accused. This is clearly bad for IT, and the entire organization.

Email archiving is a well-accepted solution for keeping email secure and accessible long term. It’s becoming more and more common, so the argument that one didn’t have the right technology in place is gradually being diminished. If your organization is still not sure if it needs to archive email, it may be worthwhile forwarding this article to upper management.

… Bob Spurzem

• SaaS offering:
  • Virus/spam/malware control for email
  • Email archiving
  • Email disaster recovery/continuity
  • Web malware filtering
• Main competition: Google/Postini and Symantec/MessageLabs.
• Competitive strengths: value pricing, ease of installation and use, strong reseller channel.
• Around 75% of sales are now through resellers; goal is to get 85% of revenues in 2009 this way, and ultimately to 90%.
• Company now spreading its reach internationally. Has good penetration in Japan.
• Financials: Privately held. Ferris Research estimates current revenue rate at $35M to $40M annually. VP Product Management Ryan Walsh says that the company has been profitable since February 2009.

Comments:

• The company has a big commitment to the channel, with some 1,800 partners. It expects almost all sales to be done by third parties, including sales to large organizations. That’s an interesting point of differentiation.
• It’s interesting that Microsoft’s anti-virus/spamware/malware SaaS offering isn’t the main competition. Microsoft has gone quiet in this regard over the last few years, presumably as it incorporates its FrontBridge acquisition.
• Another point of differentiation is value for money. MX Logic services are priced aggressively by its resellers. End customers often pay $1 to $3/user/month, depending of course on volume and mix of services.
• Given the current climate, it might be best if the recently achieved profitability can be maintained. That said, investment cash is available for pure startups and growing companies with a proven track record, so further fund-raising should be possible should MX Logic seek this.
• MX Logic has built its own cloud platform and feels its multitenant scalability is a major underlying strength. We see no reason to disbelieve this, although our knowledge of the platform is currently limited.

… David Ferris

Colligo has a useful set of tools that enhance the SharePoint experience. The latest version, 4.0, has some interesting features:

• Contributor Uploader for Outlook. Lets you seamlessly transfer emails between Outlook and SharePoint.
• Attachment Manager. Lets you upload attachments seamlessly to SharePoint. The file is replaced, in the email, by a link. The document, now in SharePoint, can now be worked on by a group of people. That’s very useful.
• Contributor File Manager. This lets you use Windows Explorer to browse not just your desktop, but also the SharePoint workspace. Right clicking an item lets you do SharePointy things.

Normally, Colligo sells its Contributor suite in a bundle. Quantity one pricing for this is $179/seat for a perpetual license. Optional annual maintenance is 25%. Quantity one pricing for Contributor Uploader alone is $75/seat; Contributor File Manager alone is $125/seat. Volume discounts apply.

… David Ferris

• Appliance dynamically scans all protocols and ports over a network link.
• Can log/quarantine/block/redact offending material.
• Policy-based encryption.
• Also scans endpoints; e.g., for downloads to detachable USB drive.
• Main competition: Symantec/Vontu, McAfee/Reconnex.
• Does real-time content checking so can catch material on the fly.
• Pricing: $20,000 for base unit, plus user pricing (e.g., $49.94/user for 500 users, $32.25/user for 10,000 users).
• Company is privately held.

Comments:

• The DLP market is still very small, despite plenty of hype. Most vendors have very small revenues. For example, one of the more visible players, Reconnex, was doing about $4M/year when it was sold to McAfee in late 2008. Ferris Research estimates that the market for DLP solutions does not currently exceed $100M.
• GTB was missed in the recent wave of acquisitions of DLP products, in which EMC/RSA acquired Tablus, Symantec acquired Vontu, Websense acquired PortAuthority, and more recently McAfee acquired Reconnex. Vericept and GTB are some of the independents left.
• CEO Uzi Yair believes the major strengths of the product are:
  • Greater accuracy than with competing technologies. This may very well be the case; with an hour’s demonstration of the product, we were unable to corroborate the assertion. If he’s right, this would be an important advantage. Inaccuracy is a major problem with today’s data leak prevention technology. We’re tentatively skeptical about the assertion of greater accuracy; we’d be delighted to be proven wrong.
  • The ability to block material in real time. Yair says his competitors can’t do this; they can only log offending material. We’re surprised at this, but if his assertion about the competitors is correct, we’d agree it’s an important strength.
  • The product scans all ports and protocols; Yair asserts, again to our surprise, that the competition doesn’t do this. If they don’t, they should.

… David Ferris

• Provides POP/IMAP server, Webmail client, email archiving.
• Linux-based with open standard components.
• Pricing is a one-time license. Base product is $300; then per-user cost which is typically $0.10/user/year.
• Appearance can be customized.
• Professional services also available.
• AtMail is privately held, with no external funding, and is profitable. Ferris Research estimates revenues at $1M to $2M/year.
• Customers include ISPs, education, health care organizations.

Comments:

• You can see that this offering would be especially attractive to ISPs in developing countries, with extremely tight budgets. AtMail clients include ISPs in such places as Yemen, Rwanda, Pakistan, and often sends an engineer to customer sites for a week for implementation support.
• Your editor loves to go to developing countries and position with AtMail.
• This company sounds like fun. CTO Jason Brown lives in Montana, and CEO Ben Duncan likes to go off to the Australian outback with solar panels and satellite links. All the same, I bet they work very very hard.

… David Ferris

It’s early days for Exchange built-in archiving, and storage management is an important area in which it falls short:

• It does not move archived email off the Exchange Server. Since email never leaves the Exchange Server, Exchange data protection, storage, and recoverability will all be adversely affected as the total Exchange storage increases.
• It (as well as all previous versions of Exchange) does not perform single instance storage across all of its stores. This means the email you archive in Exchange 2010 is not de-duplicated, which further compounds archive storage problems.

At last month’s TechEd, a Microsoft employee presented Exchange 2010 archiving and positioned the offering as a “personal archiving” solution and not an “organizational archiving” solution. This is correct. Today, an organizational archive must keep the archive data off-host, fully de-duplicated, and under full retention management.

Exchange 2010 archiving is a useful replacement for PST files and personal archiving. But it falls short of a true organizational archive solution. Today, only third-party solutions deliver all the features required.

… Bob Spurzem

Google Wave has an abstraction that seeks to replace both email and IM, and perhaps shared document editing too. Google argues that email was designed a long while ago, and that with modern technologies we can do much better. A converse argument is that email is a natural and basic electronic communication that evolved without design (much as soccer evolved without the need for formal rules or design). Things that really impress me about Google Wave are:

• The amount that can be done in the browser, in a way that is clearly browser independent. This is a long, long way from static HTML.
• The way that messages are shared as you type. (Scary, but really neat technology.)
• The use of XMPP (Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) for federation. The need for getting XMPP (as well as HTTP) into the browser seems an increasing priority.

This is a technology to watch.

Desirability of a Multi-Vector UI

I watched my son using his iPhone the other day to exchange SMS with his girlfriend. The UI was modeled on iChat (Apple’s IM client), and it seemed a natural way to use SMS. My Nokia phone has an integrated messaging interface, and gives a uniform UI for SMS and email. I can see my SMSs with a listing pretty much like my email. The key observation is that UI can be remarkably independent of the underlying technology.

Under the hood, Wave is essentially “bboards on steroids.” It is a shared data structure to which multiple users can contribute. Having this will add to the list of things that I need to interact with.

What I would like is a single UI that deals with all of the underlying abstractions (email, IM, SMS, Wave) — a communicator that can present information in an appropriate manner and use whichever channel is appropriate. It would be good to decouple the UI from the transport more strongly.

Email Won’t Go Away

I often end up in interminable email discussions with multiple nested quotes of previous messages. Engineers seem particularly fond of this style. Google Wave seems to offer a much superior interface for this type of dialogue.

However, it does not seem a replacement for all email. Email can often be a highly transactional mechanism. When dealing with emails to external organizations and individuals, there will often be shared internal review of the message and a carefully worded response before it is sent. The sharing and dynamic nature of Wave does not seem appropriate for the external communication. Email as it stands seems to have uses for which it will not get replaced. It seems to remain a basic and essential communications building block.

Google Wave Won’t Be the New Desktop Client

For those with almost permanent access to fast networks, shifting to a Web-based communications option seems quite plausible. For those who travel on trains and planes, carrying your email world on your laptop remains highly desirable. The ability to use Google Gears to replace this seems pretty much a fantasy for now.

It also feels right to me that having an optimized tool (both in UI and protocol terms) for tasks that are done a lot (and I do email a LOT) seems sensible. If you have special communications protocols such as IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and XMPP, why try to layer things over HTTP?

The lack of competition in desktop email clients is a problem. I use Outlook, which I think is the best option available, but it could do so much better. The lack of serious competition to Outlook is a real problem (and yes, I know about Thunderbird). Competition in the browser market has really improved things for everyone. We need a good desktop client. It is crazy that there is not a client that does efficient IMAP and XMPP with an integrated UI.

Google Wave does not provide an answer to this, but it certainly challenges all who are concerned with communications UI.

… Steve Kille

• LiveOffice CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint lets Mimosa customers seamlessly push some or all of their on-premises archive into LiveOffice’s cloud-based archive.
• The upload-to-cloud interface is tightly integrated with that of Mimosa.
• The pricing is proportional to the number of mailboxes put onto the archive. It’s independent of the amount of storage used, and how long archived material is kept. Contact either of the vendors for detailed pricing.
• LiveOffice is profitable and privately held. 2008 revenues were $23M.

Comments:

• This is a good idea. It’s immediately valuable for Mimosa customers. It lets them:
  • Provide third-party access to the archive; e.g., to facilitate opposing counsel discovery, or to satisfy Freedom of Information requests.
  • Offload storage management to a third party. Storage technology is changing rapidly and is something of a pain to administer, so in principle the idea of offloading the job to a specialist makes sense.
• It’s a smart move by Mimosa. It lets the company deliver a short-term solution for this need. Longer term, presumably Mimosa will provide its own external-access solution.
• Most on-premises email archiving systems provide services to allow within-the-firewall access to the archive. They provide no, or poor, access for external third parties. A typical approach today is to filter out the required corpus, put it on a DVD, and FedEx out the disk. It’s labor-intensive, slow, and inflexible.
• The right way to provide external third-party access is clearly via a rich browser interface. Expect many on-premises archiving vendors to develop such solutions over the next two or three years.

… David Ferris

New solutions for SharePoint archiving can be the answer to this problem. SharePoint archiving solutions capture SharePoint content at the item level and keep it secure in a central repository for search and compliance. Individual items in the archive can also be copied back to SharePoint to, in effect, serve for single-item restore. So a SharePoint archival solution delivers benefits for both archival and data protection.

A single solution for SharePoint archiving and data protection improves SharePoint manageability and reduces cost.

… Bob Spurzem

• Works with Exchange Server.
• Outlook plugin.
• Search is very simple and straightforward.
• Main next elements of product roadmap are offline support and improved search.
• Pricing is $30/mailbox for perpetual license, plus optional 25%/year maintenance.
• Focus is on sales to SMBs with up to about 500 mailboxes.
• Focus is on storage management benefits rather than compliance.
• Main competition: GFI, metaLogic, Quest, Sherpa, Sunbelt.
• Red Gate is privately held. All growth has been organic, with no external financing. We estimate revenues at $25M/year.

Comments:

• The philosophy of the product is to offer a simple solution that meets the needs of SMBs, and to sacrifice all the bells and whistles that larger organizations need.
• The ease of use comes naturally from the streamlined feature set. For example:
  • Everything archived is kept forever, so there’s no need for retention policies.
  • Archiving policy can only be defined by size of email, and how long it’s been kept; e.g., “Automatically archive messages over 10MB that have been in the message store for over 3 months.”
  • Limited compliance support; e.g., no tagging.
• Based on a demo, we agree this product is exceptionally transparent for users. Product manager Elizabeth Ayer says that installation is very simple and we have no reason to disbelieve her.
• Things won’t be quite as simple for users as Red Gate thinks. There will be human factors to consider. For example, companies will need to apply homegrown tagging strings in subject lines to facilitate searches (e.g., “2007-TAX-ISSUE”), and ensuring they follow the procedure correctly will be lots of fun for management.
• Red Gate is an established vendor of database tools. It is good at selling these directly to IT staff in SMBs, over the Internet. Even though IT staff in SMBs are small, it’s unclear how much the goodwill Red Gate has among developers will influence the people who administer Exchange.

… David Ferris

• Spammers can send from developing countries where the charges are very low
• Spammers will sometimes work out ways around the system, where the recipient pays
• Developed countries have introduced “messaging unlimited” plans that lower the cost of sending

This constitutes a major problem for wireless providers, because SMS is a major source of revenues to them, unhappy users will (expensively) call the help desk, and it’ll increase churn.

Today, a number of vendors offer cellphone-based solutions for virus control, but no proper spam control solutions are available. Cloudmark has just come to the rescue of service providers with its Cloudmark MobileAuthority:

• Software that runs on service provider’s equipment
• Suppresses spam, phishing, fraud and viruses sent over SMS or MMS
• Main underlying techniques are the mainstream spam control mechanisms of sender reputation, content analysis, and human inspection

Other comments:

• Assuming the technology is reasonably good, which we expect, Cloudmark should do well with this offering
• In the US, which has been slow to adopt SMS, users perhaps receive two spams a year. In Europe, one SMS spam per week is typical. In India, you receive perhaps two SMS spam daily, in China it’s more like five to 10 daily
• SMS caught on first in Europe. It’s relatively new to the US, where it’s growing quickly. Jamie De Guerre, Cloudmark CTO, tells us some US operators are now carrying over one billion SMS messages per day and saw a 275% increase in volume in 2008 over 2007
• The state of the art of spam control among service providers today is primitive. The service provider maintains lists of spammy words; where these words are detectd, the message is suppressed. This isn’t good enough. It’s way too labor intensive to maintain, too much spam gets through, and too many valid messages are suppressed. It’s reiminscent of spam control in the early days of email-based spam
• There’s much more SMS spam than MMS. MMS is more of a problem for virus transmission

David Ferris

In the shartphone world, Microsoft’s ActiveSync is dominant, largely because business people need to communicate with Exchange. ActiveSync is based on SyncML, with a number of important improvements added by Microsoft. With its bundling in Apple’s iPhone, ActiveSync has consolidated its smartphone position.

Phone vendors would like to standardize on a single software architecture. Basic phones and feature phones have lesser capabilities than smartphones, but in the future, presumably they will contain much the same systems software as smartphones, with much of the software inaccessible. So ActiveSync could end up being the dominant force for synchronization right across the mobile phone spectrum.

On the other hand, it’s unclear if ActiveSync will be much supported on the server side (apart from Exchange lookalikes). CalDAV (an open protocol for group scheduling) could be an element of a more open sychronization solution; this is also supported by the iPhone.

… David Ferris, with thanks to MailSite’s CEO John Davies and Isode’s CEO Steve Kille for their input

The company’s 2008 revenue was 60% up on 2007, to about $6.1M. Synchronica is focusing on working with major VARs/integrators who sell to service providers, to develop them as a channel. This appears to be working well. Part of the growth is due to acquisition.

Synchronica appears to be executing reasonably well. So why aren’t its revenues higher? In the enterprise space, this could be explained by competition from Microsoft’s ActiveSync and RIM’s proprietary synchronization. But Synchronica also serves feature and basic phones, which represent 90% of the market and aren’t affected by ActiveSync and RIM. Despite a long sales cycle, you would have thought Synchronica revenues would be higher by now.

Several possible reasons come to mind:

• The very long cycle from initial sales to customer-driven revenues, which occurs when a vendor sells to carriers and income is proportional to actual adoption.
• The core capability is based on SyncML. This looked promising at one time, but has been losing popularity among carriers.
• Many capabilities of smartphones will migrate to feature and then basic phones. This encourages synchronization to be done the way it is on smartphones: i.e., using ActiveSync and RIM’s protocol.

… David Ferris

Some will survive by competing on price. Most others will survive by competing on functionality; e.g., better service, or better integration with third-party tools such as BlackBerry, or better integration with industry-specific applications. Many of today’s hosted Exchange suppliers will disappear.

Current players that are likely to survive include Apptix, Intermedia, Rackspace, and USA.NET.

… David Ferris

• Company believes it now has the greatest number of customers for full hosted Exchange–we see no reason to disbelieve this claim. These are seats for full MAPI running with normal Outlook along with all the rich MAPI functions (calendaring, tasks, shared folders, etc.), rather than users with just POP/IMAP access to Exchange.
• We estimate that Intermedia has about 200,000 such full MAPI licenses. Marketing VP Danny Essner estimates there may be a couple of million such instances of full hosted MAPI deployed. We’re inclined to agree, once you cut out trial/test accounts. It’s still very early days for hosted Exchange.
• Typical mix of hosted Exchange functionality includes BlackBerry access and spam and malware control; typical cost is around $16/user/month.
• Intermedia was the first hosted provider to support the beta version of E2010. That’s impressive–it helps to validate the company’s claim that its architecture helps it keep current with Microsoft. The main reason is that it doesn’t use Microsoft’s HMC.

… David Ferris

• Originally known as RISS, more recently as Integrated Archiving Platform (IAP).
• Currently supports Exchange (including calendar and task items, shared folders), Notes email, files, and databases.
• Future support planned for SharePoint, instant messaging, and ECM systems.
• Main reasons to buy: storage management (worldwide), plus compliance and e-discovery in U.S.
• Always sold as hardware and software bundle.
• Pricing:
  • The list price of the IAP base system, which provides up to 6.3TB of integrated storage, is $70,300 (includes the first year of maintenance support). The IAP is priced on capacity and object ingestion, the latter being the biggest variable between customers. The HP Email Archiving software for Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino is priced per user and sold in 500 and 10,000 license to use (LTU) increments. The first year of software support must be purchased.
  • For example, for 5,000 Exchange users, a system with 1GB of storage per user, and limited professional services, would list at about $400,000; i.e., $8/user. After the first year, 22% maintenance applies.
• Main competition: Symantec, Autonomy, Mimosa, CommVault, and EMC.     
• Most sales to enterprises are direct; most sales to medium-sized organizations (say 3,000 to 10,000 employees) are via resellers.

In our view, the most interesting aspects of the offering are:

• Integrated hardware and software solution, usually along with professional services.
• Scalability: up to 450TB, billions of objects, 100,000+ users, largely due to the underlying grid architecture and the built-in indexing and other storage intelligence.
• Fast query and retrieval, largely due to built-in indexing and other storage intelligence.
• Tight integration of software and hardware. This implies various benefits; e.g., more reliable retention policy implementation, more reliable chain of custody, and greater certainty about access controls.

… David Ferris

The latter caught our eye. As readers may be aware, deleting a file is unlikely to really delete the information. Chunks of the information remain. It’s hard to get rid of information, and that’s a security problem.

A growing number of vendors offer solutions to do deep/utter data erasure at the disk level. See our commentary on Blancco, to illustrate.

Jetico’s BCWipe can do disk-level wipes, but it can do them at the file level as well. That’s useful. There are many occasions on which one needs deep erasure of an individual file, when wiping an entire disk would be extremely inconvenient. Jetico says the algorithms used are those dictated by the U.S. Department of Defense. BCWipe Enterprise is for IT administrators, and provides centralized control for many separate PCs.

… David Ferris

SharePoint is a natural application to manage file sharing, collaboration, and content sharing. With the introduction of MOSS 2007, its popularity has grown rapidly. However, SharePoint’s success brings challenges in storage growth, item-level restore, retention, and compliance. Just like Exchange Server, when SharePoint farms grow, performance suffers, recovery times lengthen, and compliance risk increases.

SharePoint archiving solutions copy documents and content to a central repository and the original files can be replaced with stub files to reduce storage. The resulting archive is managed according to retention policy and the content can be easily searched for legal discovery.

If you don’t have an archive strategy for SharePoint, you probably should develop one. It is better to anticipate storage growth, and proactively preserve SharePoint records, than to leave everything until disaster hits in the form of a major lawsuit.

… Bob Spurzem

• Helps with a wide variety of SharePoint issues, such as:
  • Managing permissions
  • Monitoring and managing activity and storage and generally seeing what’s happening
  • Moving and copying sites
• Uses SharePoint security, so only one security infrastructure to manage.
• Product first shipped in April 2008. See our commentary of that time here.
• Axceler tells us it’s doing well and is being well received. We are inclined to believe them.
• The product won a Best of TechEd award recently. It’s not clear that this really says much about the product, since the process by which most industry awards are granted is very haphazard.
• Pricing seems reasonable. A perpetual license lists at $5K or $10K for the Web server component, plus around $0.50 to $1/user.
• Axceler also sells a wide and successful range of Notes/Domino tools.
• Axceler was formerly known as Percussion Software. It’s been around for some 15 years, is self-funded, and profitable. We estimate revenues at $8M annually.

SharePoint has been out for several years and is already highly successful. Nevertheless, it’s still crude in many ways. For example, email integration is dreadful, and the administration tools are still at early stages. So it’s good for everyone that third parties such as Axceler are helping to fill the gaps. We encourage SharePoint support staff to take a look at ControlPoint.

… David Ferris

• Scans and indexes:
  • Files, Exchange, Notes/Domino, SharePoint material
  • ECM repositories: Documentum
  • Email archives: Symantec Vault, EMC Email Xtender
• Kazeon is main competition.
• Has had $28M of external financing. Last round was in April 2009, for $8M.
• Typical pricing: $250,000 plus maintenance for an appliance managing about 40TB of data. Pricing based on amount of information indexed.
• Ferris estimates revenues at $3M-4M/year.
• Company founded in 2001; active sales started in early 2007.

Observations:

• Products such as Kazeon and StoredIQ are basically search engines, with several important add-ons:
  • Audit trails
  • A classifications system
  • Warnings about whether content can be deleted
• The company claims its linguistic analysis is substantially superior to the industry norm of, roughly speaking, regular express pattern matching and boolean logic over content and metadata. If this is true, StoredIQ deserves to do well. The limited success of the company thus far suggests that the truth of the claim should not be taken for granted.
• Many companies make claims about the superiority of their linguistic analysis. When one investigates the claims, they are usually incorrect.

… David Ferris

• Supports MS Exchange email. SharePoint and file servers planned for later versions.
• Works on live Exchange 2003/7/10 and EDB files.
• Works on Quest Archive Manager; support for other archives planned for later versions.
• Workflows and access controls enable IT and legal side of house to work largely independently.
• Lots of auditing so you can see who did what, when.
• Emphasis is on early indexing and scoping of data, so only a minimal set of relevant information is extracted.
• Main competitors likely to be Symantec, Mimosa, and Clearwell.
• Will be available 3Q09.
• Pricing tentatively $35/mailbox for perpetual license, plus optional maintenance.

Miscellaneous observations:

• This is a good example of the trend to move e-discovery tools in-house. Currently, they are widely outsourced, and expensive.
• Nice to hear about the efforts to allow internal IT and general counsel to go about their work independently, with points of overlap minimized.
• The goal of minimizing the extracted set size is good. Major costs go into working on such extracts, so keeping them as relevant as possible is a big time and money saver. However, making sure extracts are as small as possible is extremely challenging. Search engines are usually much cruder than we’d like. This is an area we can expect ongoing innovations from vendors.
• We look forward to a broader set of ESI being supported, beyond email.

To learn more, Quest is organizating an e-Discovery Virtual Expo on Wednesday, July 8, from 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. EST. Register here, at no charge.

… David Ferris

In September 2004, Veritas Software purchased KVS for its email archiving product, Enterprise Vault. Veritas merged with Symantec, and thus the product is now Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, the market-leading archiving software.

In this webcast, we discuss the Veritas/KVS acquisition with:

• Nigel Dutt, the founder and chief technologist of KVS
• Mike Hedger, KVS’s CEO
• J.R. Ahn, Director of Corporate Development at Veritas

Topics include:

• KVS’s history
• KVS’s motivations for being acquired
• Veritas’ motivations for the acquisition
• How the negotiations took place
• Terms of the transaction
• What went well
• What was more difficult than anticipated
• Lessons learned

Webcast 822.

Speakers

• David Ferris, Senior Analyst, Ferris Research. A technology analyst since 1991, David got into computer science research at Stanford University while working on a Ph.D. in philosophy. He wrote the first syndicated column in the computer industry and has since written hundreds of articles and bulletins and co-authored three books. Initially focusing on messaging technologies, David recently expanded his areas of knowledge to include compliance, archiving, content control, e-discovery, and data leak protection. He is frequently quoted in the technology and business press.
• Mike Stackpoole, Financing and M&A Analyst, Ferris Research. Mike has been involved in business sales and acquisitions for over 20 years. He assists companies making an acquisition or sale, beginning with initial strategic considerations, identifying potential purchasers or buy targets, and helping throughout the ensuing process, including negotiations, due diligence, and legal aspects. Mike is a U.K. Chartered Accountant (CPA equivalent). After business school he worked with KPMG and PWC. For the past 15 years, he has been a partner in a boutique corporate finance advisor firm.
• Nigel Dutt, the founder and chief technologist of KVS.
• Mike Hedger, KVS CEO.
• J.R. Ahn, Director of Corporate Development, Veritas.

Who Should Attend?

This event is suitable for:

• Vendor management and business development staff
• Venture, angel, and institutional investors
• IT professionals interested in emerging technology
• Vendor product managers interested in emerging technology

How to Attend

To register for this webcast, click here. There is no charge to attend.

BoxSentry has wrapped the new techniques in a product it’s calling LogiQ. The idea is that it can run alongside a traditional spam filter and automatically retrieve any false positives it finds.

As an illustration, BoxSentry offered a “typical” example: Over the test period, a deployed spam filter from one of the well-known vendors delivered 11,500 legitimate messages, but LogiQ found an additional 680 false positives in the filter’s quarantine. That’s a roughly average false positive rate, in our experience. Not exactly state-of-the-art, but pretty representative of deployed spam filters. It might equate to one false positive every week per user.

BoxSentry says that 100% of the false positives identified with these new techniques really are false positives — although they may not catch all of them.

A bold claim; we look forward to digging into the details of the techniques under NDA …

… Richi Jennings

• Like a much easier-to-use version of the big document management products (Documentum, FileNet, etc.).
• Attractive solution for SMEs.
• On-premises and cloud-based versions.
• Offers industry-specific configurations for finance, medical, insurance, distribution, and manufacturing verticals.
• Over 50% of clients are in financial services or health care fields. Looks like compliance is a driver.
• Ferris Research estimates Cabinet NG doing around $4M/year in revenues. Company is all self-financed and seems in a reasonably healthy state.
• Typical pricing: $1K/user plus maintenance for on-prem; $70-$90/user/month for cloud-based.
• Strengths:
  • A lot of functionality bundled rather than as extra-price options.
  • Easy to use and install.
  • Easy integration with other applications in Microsoft-centric environments.

… David Ferris

If this sounds familiar, you’re like many office workers who routinely jump through hoops to set up meetings with individuals outside your company. Emails sent back and forth with dates and times manually entered. Time wasted. Enter Tungle. Tungle is focused on end-user productivity specific to calendaring, and provides a cloud-based add-in for Outlook (with or without Exchange), Google Calendar, and Entourage, with Notes/Domino promised to arrive later in 2009.

Founded in 2006, Montreal-based Tungle has 18 employees and has raised approximately $6.5M so far, with an initial CDN$1.5M seed round by JLA Ventures and Desjardins VC in May 2007, followed by an A Series round of US$5M by Commonwealth, JLA Ventures, and Desjardins VC. Tungle’s solutions are delivered out of a data center based in Montreal.

Tungle users have their calendaring data and address book synchronized to the Tungle data center, with any modifications automatically pushed from the client. Scheduling a meeting requires a simple click of a button, which launches the Tungle Web site and permits population of meeting metadata including subject, location, invitees, and an optional message. Location data is integrated into Google search so it’s easy to choose your favorite Starbucks or other hangout in addition to your typical boardroom setting. Users then multiselect times on their calendar (all synched from their messaging client) that work for the meeting, and allow Tungle to select the best time. If recipients are on Tungle, their free/busy information can be checked automatically, while users not on Tungle will have the full range of available options provided, with the ability to select the timeslot that works on their end. No more back and forth trying to find a time that works.

We think Tungle has a good grasp of a market pain and has invested heavily in providing an offering that plays “man-in-the-middle” to normalize iCal traffic through its cloud-based bus to enable true free/busy across organizations. Numerous challenges exist — for example, complex meetings (recurring meetings with exceptions) have never played well between Notes/Domino and Exchange environments — and Tungle seems to have accommodated for these in its solution. We believe the biggest challenge Tungle faces will be to convince end users to leave their familiar mail client experience in favor of a new Web-based meeting scheduler. If they can get over that hurdle, Tungle has the potential to follow on the heels of solutions like Plaxo for contact management. As always, the challenge for Tungle will be to convert any viral adoption it achieves into profitability.

Companies using Microsoft Exchange may wish to have a look at Microsoft’s recently announced Exchange 2010 beta, which includes the ability to very easily share calendar, presence, and free/busy information across the Internet between federated users. But it will be some time before organizations move to Exchange 2010, and of course not every organization uses Exchange, so we predict Tungle to have sufficient runway to rapidly gain traction in the market.

… David Sengupta

Redaction is the process of blacking out or otherwise obscuring confidential or sensitive text in documents prior to releasing them to a third party for e-discovery purposes. In this case, redaction seems to have been used to make a statement.

Redaction serves a useful role in preventing the communication of privileged content to opposing parties. But in this case, CSIS has essentially conveyed the fact that it is above the law as expressed in the Freedom of Access to Information Act: It doesn’t need to provide any information, even page numbers on a memo. Yet by its extreme redactive behavior, CSIS is drawing more attention to the case, and seems to be defying someone to try and get information out of it.

Time will tell what really happened between CSIS and Abousfian Abdelrazik. Until such a time, the silence is deafening.

… David Sengupta

• Greatly reduced numbers; perhaps 5,000 people instead of an expected 15,000. No doubt mainly due to widespread corporate cost-cutting. Lotusphere suffered similarly.
• Many very valuable educational sessions, giving practical as well as planning advice.
• The exhibition had many vendors of messaging products. Because traffic was light, there was plenty of valuable time available with vendor staff for discussions and demos.
• Generally, the low attendence enhanced the event. For example, there was more time to talk to people, fewer and shorter lines, and less stress. Not exactly mellow, but a pleasantly relaxed approach to toil.
• Vendors often commented that the quality of booth visitors was high, despite numbers lower than they’d ideally wish.

Our two days at the show were very worthwhile, especially because of the many conversations we had with vendors about their products. It was nice to attend our collegue David Sengupta’s panel on unified communications.

The highlight for your interlocutor was, however, a matter of faith. America is by far the most religious of all developed economies, and we were fortunate to meet a representative of that rarest of breeds, the terpsichorean theologian. An attractive young lady was permanently stationed outside the press/analyst work room. She was diligently studying a book, so we asked her what she was reading.

In a wholesome, born-again sort of way, she earnestly responded that it was a book about the religious nature of dancing. We commented that this was interesting, since some religious people held that dancing, like music, was a tad sinful. In extreme cases, even worthy of a good smiting. Her immediate response was reassuring and brooked no uncertainty. Dancing isn’t bad; in fact, God invented dancing. An inspiring message for the messaging professional.

… David Ferris

According to AVG, it’s positively beneficial to have the majority of its “customers” who don’t pay for the product. It makes lead generation really easy. Not only are they able to up-sell consumer users who download the free version, but many of those consumers also recommend the use of AVG inside of the SMB in which they work.

Add to that the valuable stream of real-time feedback that their users’ installations provide about threats on the Web pages that they discover, and one starts to understand why the company is growing at a claimed 80% annually.

… Richi Jennings

In the past, the company gained a reputation for developing its products “for engineers, by engineers.” However, that way of planning the product roadmap has changed.

Astaro claims “600 new features” in three major releases over the past year — versions 7.2, 7.3, 7.4. The features were chosen based on win/loss analysis and other customer requests — no longer an R&D-led roadmap.

Astaro now uses Commtouch for spam control. For virus control, Astaro has dropped Kaspersky, which it says was too expensive and inaccurate.

Other notes from the meeting:

• Moved to Postgres from MySQL
• Added full https content inspection
  • Several options for deploying the proxy certificates to user PCs
• Network balancing across several connections
• Supports the proprietary Cisco IPsec client
  • So can have people move from obsolete Cisco PIX and ASA to Astaro
  • Supports iPhone VPN client (nice demo)

… Richi Jennings

Should E2003 users upgrade to E2007, or simply wait and upgrade directly to E2010, skipping E2007 altogether? The key issues are:

• What is the age of the hardware currently supporting your E2003 environment? Can your existing hardware provide good email service until you move to Exchange 2010?
• What are your budget constraints? Can you afford to purchase Exchange 2007 CALs this year and then purchase new CALs again for Exchange 2010?
• Can you afford the staff resources to perform the Exchange 2007 migration now and then repeat the process again in 2010?
• Do you require support for unified communications now, or can you wait until 2010?
• Do you need the storage archiving capabilities that Exchange 2010 now includes?
• Do you need the simplified high availability capabilities inherent in Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups (DAGs)?

When you eventually upgrade to Exchange 2010, you will require new server hardware, so plan accordingly.

… Bob Spurzem

He’s not going to allow BitDefender to make the same mistake as certain other Eastern-European AV companies, which got too big too quickly and rested on their laurels.

BitDefender is very proud of its successes in comparative testing. It’s touting a meta-analysis of several recent tests, which show the company tied with Symantec for the top spot, in terms of malware detection accuracy.

… Richi Jennings

In January, the company launched a Web security service, using a similar architecture and business model as its anti-spam technology. In other words, it’s a hybrid of a managed service — cloud-based, if you insist — that maintains a database of known Web pages, plus an OEM engine that queries the database and intelligently caches the results.

Why do it in the cloud? Commtouch argues that it’s hard to categorize the whole Internet, as the database gets huge and the changes are too big to push the updates in a timely manner.

The service categorizes the known threats so that OEMs can produce different types of products; for example, a product focused on anti-phishing, which will concentrate on the Web pages categorized as fake bank portals, etc.

Commtouch argues that being an OEM is a good place to be, as the industry continues to move to a “soup-to-nuts” UTP model. Commtouch’s vendor customers will often specialize in one or two areas and license the rest conventionally.

More controversially, Commtouch also argues that it’s risky to build a strategic relationship with a small, niche company that offers an OEM solution, because if they’re bought out, they may lose the OEM strategic focus.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

… Richi Jennings

Varonis is very proud of its EMC partnership. EMC resells the product to its disk array customers. EMC is also a customer: with 40K users of 420 file servers storing almost a petabyte of data.

More notes:

• It integrates with ActiveDirectory and ensures that file system permissions adhere to policy.
• It offers a richer user interface for permissions than Windows itself.
• You can navigate and drill into Windows server access logs, which is useful for e-discovery.
• It also helps you ensure your super-users aren’t snooping on sensitive data.
• It helps you find the business owner of data, which is important for e-discovery.
• It can flag potential permission revocations (e.g., where a user hasn’t used that permission in a while, because the user has changed jobs).

… Richi Jennings

It’s easy to be cynical. It wouldn’t be hard to see this as Websense being “late to the party.” Naturally, the company doesn’t view it that way.

Websense didn’t want to simply take its existing software platform and repurpose it onto a 19″ rackmounted server. It already has third parties that do that, which Websense says it’s happy with.

Websense saw the need for a complete platform refresh. We’re seeing the first fruits of this work in the new V10000 appliance.

• It’s based around a virtualized environment, based on Linux and the Xen hypervisor.
• The first version is simply a Web gateway/security proxy, but future add-ons will include DLP.
• Customers will be able to run multiple instances on one box.
• A new centralized management platform can control a mixture of appliances and the similar functionality provided by the Websense managed service (which is based on technology from the BlackSpider acquisition).

… Richi Jennings

As you may recall, Abaca has a really interesting spin on the spam filtering problem. Finely tuned mathematics and a big database of receiver statistics give back up some truly impressive claims. We said last year that we like Abaca’s approach; it’s very promising.

For over a year, Abaca has been working on a deal with Yahoo to add the technology — which it now calls CLX — to the spam filtering mix. A few months ago, we heard unofficially that Yahoo agreed to roll it out.

Now, Abaca is announcing that the rollout has been hugely successful, and that Yahoo is extremely satisfied with the result.

As an update, here’s the (claimed) highlights of the Abaca technology:

• Guaranteed accuracy of at least 99% catch rate (with money-back contract terms).
• Claimed false positive rate is infinitesimal (we calculate their claims equate to one in a million messages).
• After bootstrapping with recipient email statistics, no user training is required, but can be individualized by users clicking the Spam/Not-spam buttons.
• By its nature, it’s extremely scalable — a single small server can handle 90 million messages per hour.

Of course, we can’t verify these claims, but it would appear that Yahoo effectively has.

Equally, we don’t know how close to reality the false positive figures are — at best they’re based on user reports alone, which usually tend to significantly understate the reality. But, again, if the Yahoo user reports are anything close to 1:1,000,000, then Abaca has something really worth shouting about.

… Richi Jennings

Briefly, if a C/R recipient is sent email “from” a sender that it’s never heard of, it auto-replies with a challenge. Until the sender has satisfactorily responded to the challenge, the mail doesn’t get through to the recipient’s inbox. The technique is generally less accurate than those used by today’s state-of-the-art spam filters. A significant number of people just don’t respond to challenges, which means that the false-positive problem is worse than with conventional filtering. Users who employ C/R are also seen by some as spammers in their own right, because most spam has forged sender addresses — much of them the addresses of innocent third parties.

As time goes by, BoxSentry has gradually de-emphasized C/R, but until recently it was still sending challenges for a small but significant proportion of the spam it received — and hence was sending unsolicited “replies” to people who had never sent email to the BoxSentry user.

At the RSA Conference, BoxSentry confirmed that it no longer uses C/R. This is great news for Internet users. We heartily welcome this development.

… Richi Jennings

Building the Notes PIM application as a composite application means that in theory:

• Individual PIM component applications can be reused as elements of new composite applications.
• The view or data parts employed in each component application can be reused as elements of a new component application.

We say “in theory” because there is very little evidence that this has occurred. It is not clear what has been the cause of this, but explanations we have heard include:

• Data parts, view parts, and component applications have not been well enough documented to be easily reused.
• The Composite Application Editor has not been well enough documented to be easily employed.
• The Composite Application framework is too flaky for general use.
• Building component applications is beyond the skill level of most Notes developers. Remember, Domino Designer is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) platform and not a Java IDE!
• Lotus has not developed additional Notes data parts, view parts, or Notes component applications that could be combined into new composite applications. It has focused on producing component applications from other domains (DB2, SAP, spreadsheets, etc.). While in some cases these are useful, it has provided nothing additional for the Domino application development community — either business partners or in-house developers.

Over the last year, Lotus has addressed some, but not all, of these issues.

• The company has introduced a new way of packaging component applications, called a Container. A Container is a parameterized component applications template.
• It has enhanced the Composite Application Editor to be able to:
  • Graphically configure a container; for example, map the Columns in a Notes View Container (via formulas) to fields in a Notes view.
  • Graphically wire Containers together, so that publication of an event by one Container is subscribed to by another Container.
• It has produced a base set of Containers including:
  • A Browser Container
  • A Notes View, Notes Form, and Notes PIM View Container
  • A Lotus Symphony Spreadsheet Container

What concerns Ferris is that:

• While composite applications can add value to Notes applications by allowing end users to interact with data in multiple Notes and non-Notes repositories, there is very little (if any) additional Notes functionality being delivered to Notes developers. Does this mean that IBM views Notes/Domino as a “legacy environment,” rather than as a first-level RAD platform? IBM says one thing, and then appears to do another (first Workplace, now Component Applications).
• Notes development for Notes client and browser access was once unified — a Notes Navigator, View, Form, etc., had a similar Notes client and a Web manifestation. Yes some tailoring, by adding HTML fragments, was possible, but this was icing and not cake. IBM has now fragmented Notes/Domino development with separate approaches for Notes clients (Composite Applications) and the Web (Xpages). Ferris believes that if IBM wishes to signal that Notes/Domino is not a “legacy environment” ripe for replacement by Microsoft offerings, it urgently needs a road map that describes how it will reunify Notes/Domino development for Notes Clients and the Web, and then execute to it.
• At one point Lotus Notes/Domino possessed many advantages over Microsoft Outlook/Exchange/SharePoint; for example, shared-nothing redundancy, rapid email dial-tone after a failure, etc. Microsoft has now caught up, and in some areas surpassed Lotus. The two areas in which Lotus still possesses an advantage are: the ability to take documents offline and resynchronize them at a later date (SharePoint currently lacks such a facility), and RAD. IBM needs to bolster this RAD capability if it wishes to protect its Notes/Domino franchise.

… Nick Shelness

Government agencies in countries with Freedom of Information acts must carefully plan for retention of electronic information, including email, to comply with such rulings. Email records are very challenging to manage and search due to the inherent limitations of the email server, and the complex structure of email information. As a result, email continues to need specialized archiving technology, different from that for other types of electronic information. Email archiving solutions are needed to satisfy Freedom of Information requirements.

… Bob Spurzem

One of the key features of Eclipse is that it allows for the creation of user-resizable screen regions and the binding of these regions to applications. These applications can be in one of three forms:

• A native OS (rather than Eclipse) application (expressed in native machine code) that employs native OS APIs to paint its screen region
• A Java application that paints its screen region directly
• A Java application that paints its screen region indirectly via a different OS-specific Eclipse UI library on each platform, thus giving it more of an OS application look and feel

Being built atop Eclipse, the Notes 8 client can support Notes applications of the first and last form in parallel. An application of the first form, which consists of the core of a pre-version of the Notes 8 client, is employed to host historic Notes applications. A new set of Java applications in the third form is employed to realize a new Notes PIM (Mail, Calendar, ToDo, Contacts, etc.) application. This Notes PIM application was not written directly as a native Eclipse application, but rather was built atop IBM’s Composite Application framework.

IBM’s Composite Application framework allows otherwise independent Eclipse component applications to communicate (exchange events) without specific knowledge of each other. They do this via a “property broker.” The property broker allows component applications to subscribe to, and publish, events; where necessary, it will rewrite event messages from a publication to a subscription format. A collection of component applications are configured using a Composite Application Editor, to form a multiscreen region (composite) Eclipse application.

In the case of Notes version 8, a conventional three-panel PIM user interface is constructed from a set of Eclipse component applications as follows:

• A scrollable folder/view picker application is employed to display a folder/view hierarchy and publish the identity of the current user-selected (clicked) folder or view.
• A scrollable message list application is employed, that is able to:
  • Resort messages by column
  • Display only unread messages
  • Display conversations (a hierarchy of replies to an initial message)
  • Publish the identity of a selected message
• A calendar application is employed that can display a number of different graphical calendar representations (views) and publish the identity of a user-selected calendar entry.
• A contacts application is employed that is able to display:
  • A scrollable list of contacts which can be resorted by column
  • A scrollable business card array of contacts
  • Publish the identity of a user-selected contact
• A scrollable to-do list application is employed that is able to:
  • Resort to-dos by column
  • Publish the identity of a selected message
• A message/calendar entry/to-do/contact application is employed that displays the contents of a selected message/calendar entry/to do/contact, through the medium of a Notes Form, and which allows the contents of a Form to be entered/modified.

In addition to the above, component applications are, by convention, constructed in two halves, which consist of:

• A data part that maps data between a native data representation (database record, database records, spreadsheet, web service, etc.) and a common data representation (array, list, etc.)
• A view part that transforms data in a common representation into a visual representation (table, chart, map, etc.)

… Nick Shelness

He’s right. Today things are messier. Symantec currently sells the top-selling backup solution for Exchange, Backup Exec, and it also sells the top-selling email archiving solution, Enterprise Vault. The inference is that at some point, one will go away.

Illustrations exist today of Mr. Salem’s assertion. For example, Mimosa Systems has a combined backup and archiving solution for Microsoft Exchange, and is giving Enterprise Vault some interesting competition. Long term, presumably Microsoft will fix things. On April 15, it announced that MS Exchange will provide a unified view, for users and administrators, of archives and local and server-based storage; presumably backup is integrated.

… David Ferris

Microsoft has built its online offerings atop its cloud platform (Windows Azure) and is exploiting Active Directory federation. However, IBM’s initial LotusLive offerings are not based on IBM’s Blue Cloud platform, and will initially operate in silos:

• LotusLive Notes atop a multitenanted Domino platform
• LotusLive Engage atop a number (due to the Outblaze acquisition) of different multitenanted (?) platforms

While subscribers may not care, IBM’s lack of a common platform is likely to result in higher operational costs and lower margins than Microsoft’s.

Because of Notes replication, Notes administrative role delegation, and Notes Active Directory synchronization, partitioning responsibility between IBM service administrators and enterprise user and group administrators should be relatively straightforward, though not as seamless as in Microsoft’s approach. It appears that at least initially, LotusLive Engage will be a closed system maintaining its own directory and requiring user authentication via submission of a user id and password.

Thus it remains to be seen which of the following customers want:

• A seamless choice between functionally identical on-premise and cloud-based services as is the case with Microsoft’s on-premise server and online service offerings, and IBM’s Domino server and LotusLive Notes service, or
• A wholly new and functionally different offering on-premise and online. This will be the case with IBM’s on-premise servers (Domino, Sametime, QuickR, Connections), and LotusLive Engage.

The jury will be out for some time on this one.

… Nick Shelness

• Whether LotusLive was merely a rebranding of Bluehouse
• What the role of Notes/Domino would be, given the simultaneous announcement that IBM was acquiring Outblaze

Ferris recently had an additional briefing on LotusLive that has cleared up some of the confusion.

The key message is that LotusLive is a brand and not a product, and that the LotusLive brand will be applied to both an initial, and an expanding and evolving, set of products. The technology that will form the basis of some of these LotusLive products already exists in Lotus on-premise offerings, and some of these on-premise offerings (Notes/Domino, Sametime, QuickR) are already capable of multitenanted deployment (remember AT&T Network Notes!).

A LotusLive Notes (messaging only) offering will be available almost immediately delivering both rich (Notes) client and Web (iNotes) client support. LotusLive Notes will bundle support for: 1GB user mailboxes, an anti-malware facility, an online archiving facility, and QuickR Personal Edition with 50MB of storage. LotusLive Notes is aimed at larger organizations “with 1,000-10,000 employees.” LotusLive Notes is directly comparable to Microsoft’s Exchange Online offering. As IBM is yet to publicly release pricing information, a direct price comparison is not yet possible.

LotusLive Engage is effectively a rebranding of Bluehouse and remains in beta. It is being positioned primarily as an extranet offering:

• As Google is doing with Google Apps, Lotus is trying to significantly expand the footprint of online collaboration, beyond email, calendaring, and IM, so as to justify a for-fee service.
• IBM may also choose to host rebranded editions of Lotus Live Engage on behalf of ISPs (primarily, telcos) that would market these offerings to their subscribers.
• LotusLive Engage currently lacks an email component, and this was the primary reason for the Outblaze acquisition. Outblaze has also had considerable experience in hosting own-branded email services on behalf of ISPs, if IBM chooses to go down this route.
• LotusLive Engage subscribers will be able to invite guests, at no additional cost, to view their LotusLive Engage content.
• It is not clear why IBM chose not to employ LotusLive Notes for the LotusLive Engage role. In so doing, IBM has probably handed a significant marketing bullet to Exchange Online. Perhaps to blunt this, IBM has announced that LotusLive Engage will soon support an iNotes client (whatever that means) based on Outblaze technology.
• Functionally, LotusLive Engage is very similar to Microsoft’s bundled online collaboration offering, which consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting. Microsoft’s online offering is accessible from both rich (Office), and Web (browser) clients. LotusLive Engage is a Web-only offering. As IBM is yet to release pricing information, a price comparison is not yet possible.

… Nick Shelness

For this author, the most important aspects of E2010 are:

• Most of Exchange 2007 has been rewritten to better support large-scale deployments. Among other things, it has delegated administration with a much richer set of permissions. Far more work can now be pushed down to users and user-level administrators, with a lot of flexibility.
• There is built-in archiving with retention policy and e-discovery support. Long term, this is likely to mean that the market for independent archiving products goes away. See our accompanying bulletin, Exchange 2010 Archiving: Summary & Assessment.
• There’s seamless coexistence between Exchange Online and Exchange 2010 implemented on-premises. This is very elegant, and based on a strong and innovative underlying identity architecture which we’ve discussed in other bulletins.
• There’s a centralized policy definition and management system. This is based on mainstream regular expression pattern matching and simple boolean logic, applying to message content and metadata, and for users and groups of users. Polices can be enforced manually or through user intervention. The policy framework is used in a variety of contexts, such as for data leak prevention, rights management, determining what is archived, and retention policy.
• Quite a lot of features are rudimentary, such as the ability to define tags and control what’s archived. However, the basic infrastructure is there, and there’s a path for future enhancements to provide greater sophistication. Similarly, plenty of features are now implemented in PowerShell; more friendly GUIs will follow later.

E2010 has many other improvements, many of which will be appreciated by users or administrators. They include:

• The Windows Mobile experience is now very close to that of desktop Outlook.
• With “MailTips,” users are automatically warned about potential faux pas when an an email is about to be sent, such as when a distribution list will cause it to be received by a very large number of people, or when the email is so large it’s likely to bounce, or when recipients are out of the office.
• OWA now supports all the main browsers including Safari and Firefox, not just IE.
• Email conversations are much easier to manage via the updated Conversation View.
• Voicemail previews: Text previews are generated of voicemail in Outlook, OWA, and Outlook Mobile. This saves a lot of time when quickly scanning through voice messages.
• Free/busy times can be exchanged with outside parties, not just internal colleagues, with due privacy controls.
• User-customizable voicemail menu hierarchies.
• Much reduced I/O and much more flexible storage options. Continuous replication over WANs is now practical, and provides much faster recovery for damaged message stores. There is generally better resilience in case of system failure. See our accompanying bulletin, Exchange 2010: Exciting Message Store Performance and Redundancy Improvements, for a detailed assessment.
• Much faster mailbox moves; can be done while users are online, during regular business hours.

Other Comments:

• Microsoft points out that a number of these features help address the problem of mailbox overload, such as MailTips, Voicemail previews, the conversation management tools, the call answering rules, and the rich and consistent Windows/OWA/mobile experience. All of these are welcome and good developments. However, don’t expect email overload to go away.

… David Ferris

• Lotus Notes employed a single OS file to hold a single user’s mail file, while Exchange used a single “storage group” to hold multiple users’ messages. This had the effect that a disk error affected many more users, and a restore from backup took much longer.
• Exchange was much more disk I/O intensive, which meant that the likelihood of a disk error was increased.
• Lotus Notes offered “shared nothing” multisite clustering, while Exchange only offered backup and restore.

This was largely a legacy of the environment for which Exchange was designed. The power of servers and the size of disks in the late 1980s meant that Exchange, like Notes in the early 1980s, was originally designed to support relatively small numbers of users per server, each with a relatively small message store. The effect of Moore’s Law on both CPU power and RAM size, along with a 120% compound growth rate in disk bit density/cost, has meant that hardware is no longer a limiting factor. A single server is conceptually able to support many thousands of users, and disks many gigabytes of messages.

Unfortunately until its 2007 release, Exchange was largely hamstrung in its support of bigger servers and larger and cheaper disks. The problem was that Exchange was disk I/O limited. With the leap to “64-bit only” support in Exchange 2007, which resulted in a 60-70% reduction in disk I/O, and now with an additional 70% reduction in disk I/O under Exchange 2010, Exchange has finally broken free of its disk I/O straitjacket. In addition to increasing the number of users that can be supported per server, this reduction in disk I/O has the following knock on effects:

• Exchange 2010 is able to employ much cheaper EDI (SATA) as opposed to SCSI and Fiber Channel disks. EDI disks trade-off an order of magnitude (1TB, SATA II @ $105 vs. 300GB, ULTRA SCSI @ $350) improvement in per-bit cost against poorer performance (7.2k RPM SATA II vs. 15k RPM, ULTRA SCSI) and reliability.
• Exchange 2010 is able to support “shared nothing” replication, via “log replay,” of mailbox databases both within and between data centers for load balancing and much more rapid post-disaster availability.

Collectively these changes deliver the following benefits:

• They allow a backup/restore approach to disaster recovery to be replaced by a multicopy/multisite/online approach to disaster recovery.
  • Eliminating backup/restore enables much bigger mailboxes/message stores.
  • Supporting multicopy/multisite/online redundancy delivers much more rapid “disaster recovery.”
• They allow a switch to SATA drives. This delivers:
  • A near four-fold increase in mailbox/message store quotas/sizes.
  • A near four-fold increase in multisite data redundancy.
  • A near four-fold increase in disk density.
  • All at no increase in cost!
• The multicopy/online approach to redundancy eliminates the need for RAID(1 or 5)-delivered redundancy. This is good news, because:
  • While theoretically, RAID-delivered redundancy should increase reliability, in practice, buggy RAID controller firmware and drivers often detect bogus errors requiring at best operator intervention, and at worst performance-sapping rebuilds, and even reboots!

Ferris is excited about these developments in Exchange 2010. They deliver considerable new benefits to the Exchange value proposition. At the same time, achieving the benefits requires a fairly major change of mindset among Exchange deployment architects. This is especially the case when replacing expensive SAN-based disk drives and SNAP-based backups with directly attached SATA disk drives and multisite replication.

… Nick Shelness

• Tightly integrated with Outlook.
• PSTs can be dragged and dropped into the archive.
• Unified search across the live message store and the archive.
• Search across multiple mailboxes for qualified staff.
• Simple retention policies, based on the number of days of retention, can be defined. These policies can be defined to apply to a folder, individual messages, or an entire mailbox.
• Legal holds can be imposed, overriding defined retention policy.
• There’s basic mailbox and configuration logs and auditing.
• Stubbing’s not used.

Other comments:

• It’s very good that Exchange now has built-in archiving. This will be welcomed by many people and organizations, because purchasing and supporting a third-party archiving product introduces complexity and requires resources.
• This is a solid and attractive first step for Microsoft in email archiving.
• The capability is a sound basis for future enhancements. Examples of areas which no doubt Microsoft will make up for current shortcomings include:
  • More powerful policy definition and enforcement for determining what gets archived, retention policies, and content tagging/labels. Today these facilties are rudimentary.
  • Integrated support for instant messaging, SharePoint, and Windows files and folders. Today only email, voice messages, and text messages are supported.
  • Integrated support for other archive repositories, such as Documentum.
• You often end up going to PowerShell to implement controls. As these settle down, Microsoft will implement corresponding GUIs.
• For the moment, third-party products will continue to be able to compete based on superior capabilities. Longer term, however, it’s likely that the market for third-party email archiving technology for Exchange will gradually diminish.
• We look forward to learning more about the archiving. There are plenty of open questions, such as:
  • How scalable is it?
  • How will it integrate with other archives?
  • Do PSTs go away?
  • How are messages ingested?
  • How important is the archiving in reducing the size of large mail stores, given that stubbing isn’t used?

… David Ferris

Archiving is now spreading to other forms of electronic communication, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, and files.

What about information in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter? This is a new form of electronic data and it’s too early to know its value for e-discovery. Keep an eye on social networking in your organization and monitor its use. If a significant amount of business content begins to show up in these channels, then it may be cause to consider some type of management and archiving.

If your organization has had a case where social networks data was discoverable, please post a comment. We are interested to see how this nascent challenge evolves.

… Bob Spurzem

The cost of archiving is not the point. The key value of archiving is preservation of data. It is a major fault to assume that the data you wish to “discover” is sitting where you expect, waiting to be discovered. Often the data was deleted by the end user and can only be found on an old backup. Or a file may have been edited, without any change to its name.

Archiving is a necessary underpinning of e-discovery. It removes the risk of lost data and spoliation.

… Bob Spurzem

Existing laws for the preservation and production of data for legal discovery aren’t limited to paper. They apply equally to electronic information.

… Bob Spurzem