The Pleasanton, California-based company has email archiving as a service only in North America (its Digital Safe offering), while last year’s acquisition of Canadian ISV Educom gave it a licensable software product called EAS, which it markets worldwide. It has, however, already tested the waters of a managed service in the UK, where three of the five so-called Magic Circle law firms take its Introspect service for discovery and disclosure management, which is essentially a litigation support tool.
Now Zantaz feels the time is right to extend its broader managed service offering, starting with the UK but rolling it out to data centers in other countries as demand requires. King was coy on details of potential data center partners but admitted that those with a pan-European presence would clearly be frontrunners in negotiations.
So will the services Zantaz offers in Europe be the traditional Digital Safe portfolio, architected for high-end customers on Wall Street? Again, King declined to go into detail, but he did say: We could host the [more mid-market] EAS product in the US, we just haven’t had any requests to do so. He also suggested that the UK may see an innovative offering not made by Zantaz before, and something that could then be replicated elsewhere, hinting at a service provider relationship as the route to market.
There will be a gradual convergence of the code bases of Digital Safe and EAS over time, but King wouldn’t put any time frame on the move. It’ll be in stages, he said. What is clear is that the service business, which still provides the bulk of revenue for the privately held company, and the software portfolio will start to show a commonality of features, even if the underlying code is different.
Zantaz’s first expansion of the service offering in Europe will be more infrastructure for Introspect, which the company sees as a differentiator for its for its portfolio vis-a-vis its competitors. On the product side, Zantaz competes with storage heavyweight EMC with the technology it acquired through its Legato acquisition, Symantec (the KVS technology via Veritas), OpenText (its Ixos acquisition), and Interwoven. At least two of these players have announced partnerships with purveyors of technology to compete with Introspect. EMC announced with EED and Interwoven with Fios, King said.
On the services side, King said Zantaz sees Iron Mountain as its main competitor. They are moving more toward storage and backup, whereas we’re primarily into retrieval and management, he said.
