One of the most exciting and terrifying times in the lifecycle of a company is transitioning from a small to mid-range or mid-range to enterprise sized company. Well led companies that survive those transitions have often been planning for the occasion for some time. The longer they have been planning the more likely they’ve become aware of the need for long term archiving. Of everything.
Digital archiving suffers from a perception problem though one that is probably well-deserved. Perceived as difficult to cost-justify, hard to implement and whose benefits can often be achieved by simply throwing more disk at the problem, most companies have had a hard time justifying its deployment. However a wave of fundamental changes in the storage industry as a whole and in digital archiving technology itself are setting this technology up to be one of the hottest technologies in the months and years to come.
Right now on Yahoo finance it is counting down what it considers the top 10 tech trends for 2010. However some of the trends that it is including in its top 10 are so broad in their definition that when it lists ‘Data Centers’ as its #2 trend and then identifies nearly every technology company in the space as being part of this trend, you have to question just how real this trend is? The list of what I consider the more subtle storage trends of 2010 will be a bit more specific in terms of what features, products, services and/or vendor alliances are taking place that support these theories.
Last week’s blog took a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. This week I wanted to step even further back and reflect upon the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of when they were written as I find this insightful in two ways. It lets me know what information continues to hold the attention of readers on as well as what topics from the past might become new trends in 2010. So while there is definitely some overlap between the two, there are also some entries that appear on this list that knock some of the top 10 blogs from last week off the list.
This is one of my favorite blogs of the year to write. Even though this is only the second time since DCIG launched its blogging site two years ago that I have had the opportunity to write a blog in this format, I have been looking forward to looking back all year. In case you have not yet figured it out, today I take a look back at the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 on the DCIG site. However this year I am doing a two part series with today’s blog examining the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009.
If somebody had told us that a relative unknown company had come out of nowhere to capture 20% of the small and midsize business (SMB) market in email archiving (according to Gartner) since 2006, we would have thought it a joke. But, that is exactly what we discovered when we recently spoke with ArcMail’s CEO Todd Gates. And while ArcMail has flown under the radar screen of most publications and analysts, once we spoke with Gates and began to understand the technology behind ArcMail, we immediately understood why SMBs like the way ArcMail archives email and why they are bringing ArcMail in-house for their email archiving needs.
Among the vendor teams that I met at SNW this year, the team from STORServer stood out to me as having the best use of appliance technology built using VMware systems. STORServer offers an appliance built on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to simplify data backup. STORServer was there to talk about their VCB capabilities, which simplify VMware Consolidated Backup adoption – certainly a good use of an appliance solution approach. But more interestingly, I felt, was their use of VMware technology built into their appliance to speed the delivery of new applications capabilities to their customers.
A recent virtual eDiscovery roundtable that I participated in highlighted the difficulties that companies are having in getting their arms around the proliferation of electronically stored information (ESI) in their organization. This is especially true when one considers the growth of social media and how it can negatively impact them going forward. One attorney participating in the roundtable even went so far to say that, “We have lost control in regards to blogs, wikis and newer forms of social media.” Thankfully the news is a little bit better in regards to the management of older, more mature forms of social media such as email but challenges still remain.
In the last week I had an extensive conversation with an investment individual about what the future holds for email archiving and management software. On one hand, he astutely and accurately observed that the market is already saturated with products and that consolidation should occur. But when one looks beyond the general classifications of “email archiving” or “email management”, one quickly detects that many of these products are designed to solve specific problems in a specific market segment. As a result, email consolidation is neither as simple nor as straightforward as one might imagine and that there is still plenty of room for growth and innovation in this space.
A recent DCIG blog entry called into question the value of Bear Stearns selection of Orchestria and its inability to detect the alleged illegal activities of two of its Asset Management portfolio managers. More specifically, it asked why Orchestria did not detect the illegal activities of these individuals and why Bear Stearns did not configure it to monitor for these activities in the first place. The blog posting prompted a comment and phone call from Alan Morley, one of the individuals formerly responsible for implementing and managing Orchestria at Bear Stearns and why monitoring, detecting and preventing this activity is not as easy as it sounds.
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