In their rush to comply with regulations, mitigate litigation risks, and better manage mailboxes, users have experienced some buyer's remorse when they discover the archiving solutions they have installed don’t meet expectations due largely to issues with scalability and insufficient search engines. Early versions of first generation (First/Gen) email archiving practices and solutions focused primarily on the compliance or retention piece of the equation. Today, users expect much more from their archiving solutions, including advanced search, indexing, and classification capabilities. See Managing Archiving and Retention Risk
“Storing data is not the problem, it’s accessing it.” A simple yet profound statement from Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C Systems, who has spent much of the last decade thinking about the problem and developing solutions to improve the management of electronically stored information (ESI), in particular, email.
Privately-held C2C, with headquarters in the UK and Massachusetts and roughly 35 employees, is one of the smaller firms competing in the email archiving and management space. Still, it boasts it has more than 3 million users at more than 2,000 organizations, roughly half of whom are in the U.S. with most of the rest in the U.K. and France. The company’s Archive One product has been installed in various industries, including financial, high tech manufacturing, insurance, and petro-chemical. Hunt claims 25% growth in Europe and roughly the same for North America, no debt, no venture capital investment, and continued profitability.
In the past C2C has been pegged as a niche player catering to the SMB market, implying that Archive One either didn’t scale or that a small company couldn’t meet the demands of larger enterprises. However, Hunt was happy to describe a customer implementation with 60,000 users. He says this client had more than 250,000 PSTs in an Exchange 2003 environment, 60% of which were eliminated after they were archived at speeds up to 350 messages-per-second and C2C’s Archive One forensic search and active policy management products were applied.
Architectural Approach
Similar to other archiving approaches, C2C has a proprietary flat-file data repository, which improves search speeds over systems based on relational databases. However, C2C also stores it’s “inline index” with the data, which, Hunt says, makes the system easier to install and recover while avoiding the need to use SQL or the like. C2C uses many smaller archives rather than forcing data into one big archive, which supports a more federated approach. Once you archive all data, then you can take an action such as classifying the data. Hunt suggests the 60% reduction in archive size was largely attributed to getting rid of unnecessary ESI.
C2C Features and Functions
So what makes C2C different or better than comparable archiving solutions in the space? Hunt touts the following Archive One features and capabilities:
- Comprehensive forensic search to enable information retention and deletion,
- Live Data Management (pre-archive),
- Create automated policies for searching live data,
- Carry out actions with consistent automated rule-set,
- Information Retention Management (post-archive),
- Active policy management and rules engine to improve system overhead,
- Ease of installation, implementation, and use,
- Ability to manage data “in motion”,
- Decision-driven archiving,
- No dependency on SQL Server,
- Storage management,
- Archiving data in a logical consistent fashion,
- Ability to manage data within your storage environment,
- Pricing 20% lower than the sector leaders.
Like most systems, support is provided for accessing your archived email on all major browsers, including those running on Blackberry and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. C2C offers fully automated data management to “aid capacity, compliance, eDiscovery and retention management of files from the moment they are created on the file server until the time they are no longer required.”
What’s Next for C2C?
C2C has recently added a Domino agent and announced integration with SharePoint, thereby reducing the potential governance and compliance risks arising from the growing use of SharePoint for sensitive, critical, and important information. A partnership with Titus Labs will help to improve its auto-classification capabilities. While C2C today is an in-house-only solution, Hunt has given some consideration to deploying a SaaS model, but nothing is in the works at the moment. Today C2C sells through channel partners and is in the process of adding to its direct sales force in the U.S.
Questions and Considerations
While C2C clearly seems to have strong forensic search, live data management, and policy management capabilities to reduce storage overhead and stage data for post archiving activities, the following questions and considerations arise:
- How does Archive One effectuate control (agent, crawler, bot), and what is the network overhead to copy entire files from desktops?
- Once email is archived, how is it classified, and what auto-classification characteristics does the solution possess at the archive level?
- What are Archive One’s capabilities for hold / preserve which is the key obligation and risk when it comes to eDiscovery?
- How does C2C plan to improve on its core, proprietary system technology so as not to be left behind when Next Generation (Next/Gen) solutions become available in 18 to 36 months?
- What technology and solution partnerships will C2C pursue to keep up with the innovation curve while adding functionality to it’s existing solutions?
- How does a small company keep customer support levels high to maintain a healthy double digit growth rate while at the same time competing with the larger players in the space?
Bottom line
How C2C addresses these key issues and challenges mentioned above and others going forward will determine whether they can continue to compete in a space with billion dollar players intent on garnering market share and well funded start ups that are pushing the innovation curve especially in the high-end auto-classification space. Wikibon considers C2C’s lack of a robust auto-classification engine to be its biggest weakness. However, the unabated growth of unstructured ESI and the continued need to proactively manage it are favorable trends for C2C and other players in the space.
Action Item: When developing a short list of vendors in the email archiving and management space, users should consider companies such as C2C when managing email archives to reduce overall unstructured data stores is of paramount importance. Until the sector matures and truly unified Next/Gen solutions emerge, there is no clear leader, and users should continue to adopt a best-of-breed strategy to improve functionality and ROI over the next 18 to 36 months.
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