Category: Autonomy

The recent announcement that CA acquired Orchestria to extend its identity and access management portfolio to include data loss prevention raises some key questions about exactly what problems CA hopes to solve. While DCIG sees the value in companies acquiring and merging with other companies to solve specific strategic problems, this one left us scratching our heads a bit. After all, wasn’t it Bear Stearns who back in 2005 selected Orchestria to oversee its electronic communications? But now, in the light of day, really how much benefit did its implementation of Orchestria provide Bear Stearns in light of its recent public failure?

As analysts within the electronically stored information (ESI) space, DCIG pays close attention to not only features and benefits of specific products and solutions but also monitors other articles, blogs, and columns in the broader market place about specific vendors. In instances where allegations are made, it then tries to sort fact from fiction and present a more complete picture. Recently, some allegations about Autonomy have surfaced that sparked interest at DCIG as to their accuracy.

Not too long ago, we can recall checking our voice messages and finding 30 to 50 messages in our respective inboxes every day. We would listen to them and then delete some or all of them, making notes along the way until we reached the end of the mailbox. While some of the messages were irrelevant, some were very important in that they conveyed corporate direction or pseudo-contractual agreements. Given that same scenario today in the financial industry, companies need to exercise extra caution as regulatory agencies and courts heighten requirements for companies to make documents of any type available, including audio recordings (telephone messages, voice mail, etc.).

Within the Enforcement Manual of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Division of Enforcement, there exists a definition of the document types for which an officer might deem relevant and issue a subpoena. Though the definition reads “…messages of any type, telephone messages, voice mails…or otherwise, which can be retrieved, obtained, manipulated, or translated”, most companies focus on the “messages of any type” component of that definition. When they do, they put audio recordings such as phone and voice messages on the backburner as there is no efficient way to handle them. But having to deal with audio content from phone systems, VoIP, call desks, trading desks, etc., is entering the mainstream of eDiscovery.

It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy’s solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI.

In Part 1, we talked with Jack Halprin about transitioning from a forensic collection product and market to Autonomy’s enterprise solutions. Now we get to learn more about the specific products that he is working with and how they address customer’s pain points in the early stages of the e-Discovery lifecycle.

This blog entry is the first in a series of interviews with Autonomy’s new Director of eDiscovery, Jack Halprin. Jack is well known in the eDiscovery world having held a lead role on the EDRM Metrics Project and for his work at Guidance Software.
In this first interview, Jack gets to talk about what drew him to Autonomy and his first impressions coming on-board. Autonomy’s breadth and diversity of offerings can be intimidating from a consumer’s viewpoint, so we get an expert’s inside view of what makes them different.

There are many more enterprise applications that can be dual purposed for eDiscovery and business benefits. Desktop search can help users find and designate ESI. Firewall and spam systems can actually be used to collect IM conversations. Content Management Systems expand the potential search/preservation criteria and can decrease the potential volume of ESI by enabling active expiry of unnecessary items. The important thing is to think beyond point solutions and bring legal, business and IT to the table to extract the greatest value from the ‘cost of doing business’ in America.

As corporations slowly face the consequences of unmanaged information assets, they have started to form ESI retention policies, acquire email archives and other enterprise technologies needed to track and dispose of newly created communications. It is much simpler to enable policy, process and technology to handle the go forward content than to deal with years or decades of accumulated unstructured content. Most public corporations have existing preservation requirements to deal with on top of possible long term retention regulations.

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the ‘secondary benefits’ of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality.