Originating Author: Gary MacFadden
Back in May 2008 Mark Lewis, who heads EMC’s Content Management and Archiving (CMA) solutions group, along with several EMC colleagues, made a flurry of announcements that outlined their intention to integrate and develop a suite of existing and next generation products to support the creation, capture, flow, storage, and retrieval of the majority of unstructured data or electronically stored information (ESI) that is produced and received within an enterprise.
Using cool codenames such as projects Athena, Janus, and Magellan, EMC outlined promising Web 2.0 applications to enhance user collaboration for Documentum clients along with announcements regarding the “integration of transactional content management for out-of-the-box solutions through the integration of Captiva and Document Sciences” as well as the development of SOA (service-oriented architecture) and next generation capture technology.
Last week I spent most of my time at EMC’s annual IT analyst event with the CMA group in particular to understand how project Janus, the "next generation in email archiving", was progressing. Much of what was disclosed is not public however piecing together publicly available information, one can readily infer that project Janus has a ways to go before it’s ready for prime time.
If you are a happy EMC client and have been waiting for its Next Gen Enterprise Email Archiving (EEA) solution, don’t take this too hard. All of the market-leading solutions in the EEA space are either immature or are clunky, first-generation systems that don’t scale, are not well integrated, or lack basic functionality. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will Janus be built quickly, as archiving solutions are complicated, expensive, and time consuming to bring to market. Take, for instance, segment leader Symantec, which opted to acquire major components such as KVS Systems and “integrate” with other point solutions, or Zantaz/Autonomy, which has separate hosted and enterprise solutions, which has also announced but not yet delivered a next/gen solution for the enterprise. Or Oracle, which has opted to OEM a solution from ZL Technologies and integrate it with its Stellent product line rather than build an EEA.
Moreover, with additional major systems players such as IBM, HP, Google, and Dell, along with a raft of smaller players, competing with in-house or hosted solutions EEA, the space is very crowded. And for good reason. Email archiving is big bucks and over the next twenty-four months, users should expect rapid change and innovations to address performance, scaling and inflexibility issues.
Large banks and financial services companies, as well as quasi-regulated big pharma firms have been forced to become early adopters for regulatory and compliance reasons. These firms will report their clear concerns that technologies they install today will be obsolete in five years-- it's the nature of the beast. As well, they will tell you the price tag for acquiring and maintaining EEA solutions can run into the tens of millions of dollars per year. Even reasonably well managed ESI storage growth for these same companies can run upwards of 5 to 10 terabytes per month. Compounding the problem is that not having a reasonably robust archiving solution to support e-discovery and litigation activities has the very real potential of costing a major corporation multiple times more than the archiving solution. These days lawsuits can be lost in the “meet and confer” stage as corporate lawyers, armed with newly minted FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) regulations governing access to ESI, are extremely IT savvy when it comes to archiving solutions and mapping data. The cost of retrieving data using a forensic data IT service can be staggering.
Many vendors including Oracle, IBM, and EMC, have chosen to include archiving within their overall content management or information management framework. However, most of the real action, and customer need, is in the archiving area. Having a well integrated CMA suite of tools and solutions could benefit users but it promises to be expensive, time consuming, and complicated. In today’s business climate the only “have to have” solution in the CMA suite is archiving.
EMC, like others, obviously sees the opportunity an EEA solution provides for additional application growth and, of course, for storage. Up until now, EMC has kept its best clients from migrating from Email Extender and other point solutions including search, e-discovery, mailbox management, case management, policy management, auto classification, and journaling offerings they have provided themselves or through partners to placate user archiving needs. But with Next Gen solutions on the horizon from other major players and the limitations of First Gen systems becoming more exposed daily, EMC needs to bring Janus to market by the summer or it will start to loose the confidence of its most valued users and be passed by other innovators in the space. The fact that EMC has committed resources to support their Exchange and Sharepoint clients should help.
Action Item: We’re at an inflection point in the CMA business, with new technologies, consumerization, search, and new classification capabilities, and big bets are risky unless you really need to fill some holes (which you should have done already). Be prepared to spend a lot. Wait and see the EMC roadmap because it’s in flux. Point solutions from all vendors look viable but don’t expect integrated CMA any time soon. Patchy is the watchword. Use point solutions to fill gaps.
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