Today TeraCloud Corporation, a long-time provider of storage resource
management (SRM) for the mainframe and open systems markets, formally
announced its acquisition of Estorian, Inc. The acquisition included
all of Estorian’s intellectual property, including its LookingGlass
e-mail archiving software and customers. The biggest surprise was that
TeraCloud also announced that it is changing its name to that of the
company it is acquiring, Estorian, Inc. The question is what would
prompt a company such as TeraCloud, whose SpaceFinder SRM software is
readily recognized in the mainframe market, to change its name and
enter the email archiving space?
TeraCloud’s, and now Estorian’s, CEO and President, Gary Tidd, sums it
up this way. Tidd says, “TeraCloud is one of the few companies that
stayed in business and remained profitable providing SRM software to
enterprise businesses during the last decade. However SRM software is
not yet taking off in the Linux, Windows and UNIX markets like we had
hoped. So TeraCloud determined it was best to refocus and go in a new
direction. Today TeraCloud is announcing our acquisition of Estorian
and the change of its corporate name to Estorian, Inc to reflect this
new corporate direction. While we are not abandoning our SRM clients, a
growing percentage of business intelligence now resides in unstructured
data such as email. Estorian’s LookingGlass software gives companies a
new and better means to capture and access email driven by new
electronic discovery requirements.”
Estorian’s LookingGlass provides a new approach to email archiving for
eDiscovery and retrieval. It utilizes the Messaging Application
Protocol Interfaces (MAPI) to capture all messaging activity within
Microsoft Exchange operating environments. For example, when a user
starts to write a message and saves a copy of it in their drafts
folder, LookingGlass captures this type of activity and stores these
messages into its archive. While a draft copy of an email may mean
nothing, sophisticated fraudsters may know how to use associated draft
folders to send emails through Microsoft Exchange mailbox delegation
without detection. Capturing messages stored in these draft folders
controls risk while many other email archiving products typically rely
on the antiquated journaling technology found in Microsoft Exchange.
Microsoft Message Journaling was introduced in 1998 as part
of a service pack. Journaling created a copy of all messages using a
basic ‘copy’ command in the message delivery subsystem. Microsoft
updated this mechanism in Exchange 2003 to include capturing recipients
of blind-carbon-copies (BCCs) using Envelope Journaling and, in
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft implemented “Journal Rules”
and “bifurcation on the Hub Transport Server”. However journaling, in
whatever form it is implemented, typically introduces a tremendous
amount of performance overhead on the host Exchange server.
LookingGlass appropriately ignored this 10 year old journaling
technology. Using MAPI, LookingGlass captures messages without
introducing agents or the performance overhead of Microsoft Message
Journaling. MAPI works by using remote-procedure calls over TCP
ports. This is the same mechanism Outlook uses to access the message
data, therefore MAPI based archiving takes advantage of the Microsoft
Exchange Store memory cache. Thusly, MAPI requires minimal overheard
versus native journaling, by not spawning a new message.
Using MAPI in an email archiving and retrieval system is an especially
good fit for organizations moving to 64-bit Microsoft Exchange. The
64-bit edition of Microsoft Exchange removes many of the storage
limitations imposed in the 32-bit edition, such as the total number of
users, objects stored in the database and access to server hardware
processor and memory. The 64-bit edition of Microsoft Exchange 2007 can
take advantage of the larger addressable memory 16 exabytes versus 4
gigabytes and 64-bit chip sets available in 64-bit hardware.
LookingGlass’s use of MAPI further capitalizes on the introduction of
native 64-bit processing since it doesn’t use agents on the Microsoft
Exchange server.
The acquisition and name change to Estorian represents a bold move by
TeraCloud to reposition itself in a rapidly changing marketplace. While
email archiving is already a mature market, the adoption of email
archiving software that provides the capabilities that companies need
is just starting to occur. Acquiring the LookingGlass email archiving
software gives TeraCloud the underlying technology it needs to
successfully compete and, by changing its name to Estorian, forcefully
demonstrates that its focus is now on helping companies get a handle on
their intellectual assets as opposed to their data storage ones. Based
on its past success in a tough SRM market where most other companies
failed, I expect Estorian to find a much more receptive audience for a
pain point that companies are looking to address now.