EMC has announced the release of a new suite of information governance products, called the SourceOne family. The products will target archiving, eDiscovery and compliance.
The initial release of the product will archive email and instant messages. EMC said that support for files, SharePoint, enterprise applications, XML and other content types will be added at a later date.
The suite is not a rewrite of existing code but a completely new architecture, Gareth Meatyard, EMC product specialist, told CBR.
The company is initially releasing EMC SourceOne Email Management and Discovery Collector. A third product, Discovery Manager, is available via a controlled released at the moment with a full release expected in the near future.
Email Management enables archiving of email from Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino as well as SMTP and instant messages. Meatyard added that this was a replacement for EMC’s EmailXtender product.
Discovery Collector is an indexing appliance that automates the in-house identification, collection, preservation, and policy management of unstructured content from a variety of locations within a company’s network, such as desktops, laptops, common Internet file systems (CIFS) and network file systems (NFS), networked attached storage, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.
The final product, Discover Manager, is a discovery search and collection tool for e-mail archived by the SourceOne Email Management. This is the part of the suite that can help companies with regulation and litigation issues, Meatyard said. It can find and hold archived email in response to a legal notice.
A full release of Discover Manager is being held back will more testing is completed, Meatyard said. “This is EMC’s most tested product ever,” he said. “With Discovery Manager we are making sure everything is as it should be. During testing we didn’t have a client that used it in anger so we’re not going to market with it just yet.”
EMC’s footprint in the storage and archiving space means it is best placed to offer this product rather than a more traditional eDiscovery vendor such as Recommind or an email management firm such as Mimecast, Meatyard believes.
“Nobody understand this area better than EMC,” said Meatyard. “As an organisation our expertise is in data centre management, we understand the end to end archiving process. Our credibility in the area is impressive.”
The product claims to offer a 50% saving on total cost of ownership with ROI coming after 12 months. Companies with 1,000 mailboxes can expect savings of $1m a year, EMC claims, and storage and backup costs can be reduced by 60%.
“This product moves email from primary storage areas to a tertiary area. This reduces the costs associated with primary storage,” Meatyard said.
