The RISS has been HP’s flagship email archiving product since 2003. Based on technology originally developed by start-up Persist Technologies, it is a CAS or content-addressed storage system and as such competes with systems such as EMC’s Centera disk archive.

Unlike the Centera, the RISS included its own email archiving software. Also unlike the Centera, the RISS has never been a hot seller. One source close to HP has said that bugs in the RISS box threw up a sales roadblock that prevented anything but limited sales.

Yesterday HP came clean. Two years or eighteen months ago, maybe even only a year ago, there were challenges with the quality of the system, admitted HP’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Martin.

But we’ve got a new focus at HP and we’ve dealt with those problems, Martin. The device is now under the control of an HP business unit set up to take responsibility for archiving and backup products previously under the care of HP’s storage division.

Martin said that HP can name reference customers that will testify that the bugs have been ironed out of the box. Even so, the OEM giant is trying to help customers forget the RISS heritage, by renaming the system as the HP Integrated Archive Platform. This is RISS version 2, Martin confirmed.

The new name was obviously chosen to emphasize what HP believes is the best quality of the system, which is that it is ready-integrated.

Organizations have been implementing archiving systems as a response to an event like audit or litigation, and typically they’ve gone out and bought say Enterprise Vault from Symantec, CAS from EMC, servers from Dell, and services from Deloitte, and then cobbled them all together, Martin said.

That contrasts with the ready-integrated turn-key nature of the HP system, although the IAP is not the only such product on the market. Another example is IBM’s DR550 disk archive, which since around 2004 has stitched together IBM servers, Tivoli archiving software, and conventional non-CAS disk.

This summer IDC predicted 23% CAGR for email archiving software revenue between 2006 and 2011, and estimated that last year archiving services and products revenue grew by 45%. Martin said that over the last two years the reasons for buying archiving systems have widened and changed from reactive to anticipatory.

It’s not regulatory compliance, it’s not e-discovery that’s the real sales driver, it’s corporate self-governance, he said, citing as example one power utility that uses the HP archiving system to complete daily scans of communications among one group of employees, searching for inappropriate behavior, possibly including Enron-style market fixing.

The reworked HP system adds support for data other than emails, namely file data, print streams and scans, and data from third-party content management systems from suppliers such as Vignette or Open Text. Because these extra data types are also searched and indexed, HP said that the IAP qualifies as an information classification device in the same mold as EMC’s InfoScape or Kazeon’s Information Server. The data is indexed at the time it hits the Archive, unless it’s coming from an ECM system, Martin said.

While the RISS carried a whopping $400,000 list starting price, the IAP starts at just $71,000 for a 1.4TB system – which according to HP is only 20% of the cost of building an archive using non-integrated components.

According to Martin the reason for the huge difference in price between RISS and IAP according to Martin is that that when the system was called the RISS, the entry-level configuration was so much larger than it is for the IAP, and because HP has been able to leverage industry-standard hardware components, which have fallen in price.

The scalability of the system has also been improved, by allowing it multiple nodes to take part in a simultaneous search of archived data.

HP has also launched a complementary Information Discovery and Policy Definition service that will advise customers on archiving policies and practices. Martin did not say whether HP included the cost of this service in its estimate that a $71,000 IAP costs only a fifth as much as a system created by combining other vendors’ products and services.