http://www.mimosasystems.com/html/news-pr-mimosa-systems-acquired-by-iron-mountain-02-22-10.htm

Iron Mountain Adds All-in-One, On-Premises Archive to Complement its Cloud Offerings; Company Now Capable of Managing Information Wherever it Resides

BOSTON (Feb. 22, 2010) – Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), an information management services company, today announced it has acquired Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa Systems, Inc., a leader in enterprise-class content archiving solutions, for approximately $112 million in cash, subject to closing adjustments. The deal provides Iron Mountain with an integrated archive for email, SharePoint data and files, and gives the company an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives.

The ability to archive and manage data both onsite, inside the customer’s firewall, and remotely in the cloud makes Iron Mountain a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management. It also provides the company’s customers with greater flexibility and choice for managing their information.

Additionally, the company can now capture and manage a broader range of enterprise information from so-called “edge-of-the-network” devices like desktop PCs and laptops as well as from company repositories like email stores, SharePoint servers and file systems. Many larger businesses still prefer to keep this data on their premises today. Finally, the acquisition allows Iron Mountain to extract intelligence from the information it manages both on-premises and in the cloud, advancing the company’s larger strategy to help enterprises lower the costs and risks associated with storing and managing information.

“We’re really excited about adding Mimosa Systems,” said Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain. “We acquired Mimosa because we believe it offers the best archiving technology on the market, and the company shares our philosophy to help customers reduce the cost and risk of storing and managing information. By combining Mimosa’s on-premises archive with our cloud-based technologies, Iron Mountain can now store, recover and discover digital content wherever it resides. This is a great example of the type of technology acquisition that fits well within our long-term growth strategy.”

Mimosa NearPoint™ is an enterprise archiving platform with applications for retention and disposition, eDiscovery, compliance supervision, classification, recovery, and end-user search, enabling customers to reduce risk, and lower their eDiscovery and storage costs. Mimosa has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and is recognized by industry analysts as a fast-growing, visionary archiving company.

“Enterprises today are buried in email and other forms of user-generated content, making information storage and management a complex, expensive and risky exercise,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group. “This deal strengthens Iron Mountain’s position in the market as a comprehensive provider of information management solutions. Its customers now have greater flexibility to store and manage their information onsite or in the cloud, where it makes sense for their budget and business.”

NearPoint joins a broad portfolio of content archiving, data protection and recovery, and eDiscovery solutions from Iron Mountain Digital. Customers wanting to archive email can now choose either NearPoint for onsite archiving or Iron Mountain’s Total Email Management Suite, powered by Mimecast® technology, for archiving email in the cloud. Additionally, customers can use Iron Mountain’s Digital Record Center® for Compliant Messaging for email that must meet SEC regulations and supervision.

The addition of the NearPoint content archive also offers customers an enhanced eDiscovery solution set for quickly finding content and applying legal holds across email, file and SharePoint data. For larger litigation matters, organizations can easily transfer their onsite data to Iron Mountain’s cloud solution, Stratify Legal Discovery® Service. For smaller matters or in instances where companies want to begin the eDiscovery process on their own, they can do so onsite with Iron Mountain’s early-case assessment tool for eDiscovery, eVantage™.

The Mimosa team will be retained and become an integral part of Iron Mountain Digital. The president and CEO of Mimosa Systems, T. M. Ravi, will assume the role of chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital, responsible for all marketing functions and helping to drive strategy planning and execution for Iron Mountain Digital.

“It’s a win-win situation for our customers and partners who can now leverage Iron Mountain’s global reach and comprehensive information management services,” said T.M. Ravi. “The Mimosa team will play a key role in the development and execution of the company’s cloud and on-premises information management strategy.”

About Mimosa
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation email, file and SharePoint archiving solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa NearPoint is the industry’s most comprehensive unstructured information management software solution for email, files, collaboration systems and instant messages, enabling archiving, eDiscovery, storage management, and recovery in a unified solution. Mimosa is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recognized for its competencies in networking infrastructure solutions, ISV/software solutions, and advanced infrastructure solutions.

About Iron Mountain Digital
Iron Mountain Digital is the world’s leading provider of information management services for data protection and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery and intellectual property management. The technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to thousands of companies around the world, directly and through a worldwide network of channel partners. Iron Mountain Digital is based in Southborough, Mass.

About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The Company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions, along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain is a trusted partner to more than 140,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit the Company’s Web site at www.ironmountain.com.

A little late with posting this one .. but interesting none the less.   Since MSFT already has search after the multi billion dollar purchase of FAST, it makes you wonder what else MSFT could be interested in.   Interwoven?

Autonomy jumps on Microsoft interest talk -traders

http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUSLO11945020090924

In choosing an archiving solution for SharePoint, it is important to ask these questions:

• What scope of SharePoint content and metadata is captured? Some solutions capture only a portion of SharePoint content, e.g., specific documents or document collections. This kind of capture supports fine-grained recovery. Others capture not only document-type content, but also all the context data for the environment—the rich data that makes a SharePoint site interactive (lists, blog and wiki entries, front-end web server information, and more). All of this content and metadata is important for eDiscovery, compliance, and recovery; a holistic archiving solution must capture and store it all. When content and context are captured, it is possible to perform coarse-grained recovery to restore or migrate full SharePoint environments.

• How is the SharePoint content captured? Content can be captured from SharePoint continuously or periodically. Continuous capture of all content related to specific departments guarantees your needs for compliance and eDiscovery are covered.

• Does the solution provide more than just lower-cost storage? Archives provide great value in enabling the move of content from production systems to cheaper storage, but an archive that can also facilitate recovery provides even greater value. Having archiving and recovery in one solution means less complexity for IT to manage and greater operational efficiency and cost savings.

• How does the archiving solution enable end-users to access SharePoint content? When end users go to SharePoint to get their content, they don’t want to be redirected and they don’t want to search two repositories for data. Rather, the right solution will make access seamless, leaving content directly accessible through the SharePoint interface. It will also integrate seamlessly with the SharePoint search index, allowing archived content to appear in search results alongside active content. Be sure that your archiving solution enables seamless end-user access so that you don’t have to train users on new ways to access their information.

• How does the solution enable eDiscovery and retention management? Since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) took effect in 2006, organizations have struggled to implement defensible litigation holds, especially on high-volume content sources like SharePoint. A good archiving solution will allow very granular controls over retention; that granular control stems from comprehensive capture capabilities and flexible retention rules. A unified content archive allows an organization to quickly implement item-level litigation holds and conduct eDiscovery through one simple interface.

• Is the solution part of an integrated content archiving platform? The most efficient archiving solution unifies email, file, and SharePoint archiving. Not only does this make tasks like setting litigation holds faster and easier, but it reduces storage costs by providing single-instance storage across all the content sources.

I hear many stories and FUD can be pretty crafty, but the one I heard this week topped it all:

“Don’t use this companies software as their eDiscovery module has a backdoor and will forward all your email to the US Government”

I’m withholding the vendor that brought this up … but crazy stuff like this isn’t going to be very effective.

It seems that not much people have been willing to touch on this subject so far so maybe I’m going to be the first one here.  As you all probably know by now, Microsoft announced Exchange 2010 back in April 15th and one of the features in Exchange 2010 that got a lot of peoples attention is that it will have build in archiving, retention and eDiscovery. I am purposely not going to single out archive company names in this article.

Microsoft positions Exchange 2010 as a ‘personal archive’ and not as ‘business archive’ solution.  The distinction is there for many reasons.  First of all, Microsoft will with this solution only focus on allowing organizations to get rid of PST files, implement large mailboxes and provide advanced search.  It will not provide records management and preservation of electronic information beyond Exchange.  It is of my opinion then though that the larger enterprises who are going to look for a more complete solution that offers functionality beyond the basics which includes:

• Integration with software and applications to manage the eDiscovery process.  Search is not eDiscovery .. a proper eDiscovery application allows you to use advanced queries to create and narrow down search result sets, review and tag this data and more (i.e. case management)
• Allow for capturing content from more than just Exchange.  Many organizations are already capturing File System data, and are moving towards implementing SharePoint as well.  Capturing more content in a unified archive makes sense for not only storage reasons but also legal and compliance reasons.

Exchange falls short of the above, but it will probably gain traction in this space more or less with the smaller organizations that are going to look for a basic archiving solution.  These customers have been there all along and are happily served by some of the around 85 companies now in this space.  I personally think that Microsoft will start to take away business from the vendors that don’t offer anything beyond email, those that provide solutions that cover the basics.  After all .. why should a company spend money to buy the exact same ‘basic solution’ from a 3rd party when it is in the base product.

Now .. there are many things that Exchange 2010 doesn’t solve, so organizations that are looking at Exchange 2010 need to clearly understand what can be done with the application and what not.  If you are looking for case management in eDiscovery .. nope .. isn’t there .. if you are looking for a solution that can locate and ingest your PST files in your network beyond the file server .. nope .. can’t do that either.  Do your homework well and make a good decision, but make sure that if you are thinking about archiving beyond Exchange (File Systems and SharePoint) even if you might not do that now but next year  , you have to pick a vendor that can offer that and not pick one that will block you down the road

I have to apologize for not posting this earlier as I have been speaking at the Microsoft UC Conference on archiving in Exchange 2010 this week (more on that in a later post).  AXS One released its 2008 annual financial report this week and the wording in it was pretty harsh. Things like:

“

because the Company has incurred recurring net losses, has an accumulated deficit and has a working capital deficiency as of December 31, 2008, there is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern“

“Additionally, the Company’s convertible debt approximating $13 million at April 8, 2009 matures on May 29, 2009 and the Company does not have the capital to pay these notes”

” If we are unable to achieve profitable operations or secure additional sources of capital in the near term, in addition to restructuring our convertible debt, there would be substantial doubt about our ability to fund future operations through the second quarter of 2009. Management could also consider merger and acquisition activity.”

But .. have no fear .. as on Thursday the company got acquired for 9 Million dollars in stock by Unify who has been picking up other companies recently.  AXS One will continue to operate under the wings of Unify as a subsidiary.

It looks like Cryoserver bit the dust again a little while ago .. its website hasn’t been updated in months.  Cryoserver went bankrupt about 2 years ago, but tried to make a fresh start.  What is not very known is that appliance software of Cryoserver is the same software that Trend Micro sells, but rebranded.

Competition is tough in the archiving market and you better have a good differentiating product to survive.

Remember this article that I wrote? It doesn’t seem that hackers need to try to get to your information when its in the all praised buzzword SaaS cloud. Techcrunch reports that even the almighty Google can mess up and had private documents shared without permissions.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/huge-google-privacy-blunder-shares-your-docs-without-permission/

There are a LOT of reasons why I don’t like Software As A Service (SaaS) for some mission critical applications. The biggest one is giving up control of your data! I don’t like having potentially sensitive client documents and work product in the hands of unknown parties. “Oh, but it’s Google, it’s safe!” Sure.

As the article above explains, even Google can sometimes mess up and compromise your documents. How about if it was a strategy memo for a client that ended up in the hands of opposing counsel? Potentially nasty? You betcha. Can you imagine the headlines when a hosted archive vendor was running both Merck and Pfizer and their information was freely shared amongst the users of the archives?

And do you know who has keys to your server room at your office? I’m sure you do - you can probably count those people on one hand; you may even eat lunch with them on a regular basis. Do you know who has the keys to Google’s server room? No. And you can say that about just about any online provider - you just don’t know who has access to those servers and that means you don’t know who has access to your documents.

That worries me. And if you handle confidential client work-product then it should worry you too.

My RSS feeds gave me the following article http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=171581&WT.svl=news2_1 from Byte and Switch.

I suspect that the coming 12 months will give us further market consolidation .. there are about 70 vendors at the moment trying to grab a bit of marketshare with both Symantec and Mimosa Systems fighting for the #1 spot.

Last May EMC announced that their archiving product line (read EmailXtender) would get an update.  The long awaited and overdue replacement for EmailXtender,  SourceOne, is however Missing in Action.  Except for a single webcast on their website, nothing is mentioned and all collateral still points and talks about EmailXtender.

Whilst googling I ran across the following documen which talks about the November 18th launch of some of the new product line.

In it you can read this about SourceOne:

·         EMC SourceOne: A new product family designed for integrated content archiving and eDiscovery, which includes EMC’s next-generation e-mail archiving product called EMC SourceOne E-mail Management that will replace EmailXtender.
Note: EMC SourceOne products will be limited availability and will require a Solutions Validation Center (SVC) qualifier through Q4 ‘08. It will not be publicly announced at this time.

Has EMC decided that keeping the current version is better than its replacement?

Have they hit a snag in development?

One has to keep in mind that EMC EmailXtender and Enterprise Vault were once formidable competitors in the market.