Storage Toolkit

Nuclear shelter turns to email

Ed Frauenheim CNET News.com

Published: 01 Jun 2004 12:00 BST

You have warehouses around the country where you are storing the paper records?
We operate out of about 50 million square feet of space around the world. That is over probably 700 locations. It is one thing to manage one warehouse with maybe 100,000 or 200,000 items in it. Try managing a warehouse with 4 million or 10 million items in it. An item misplaced is an item lost, when you have that many.

Do you make that argument to customers, when you go to their sites?
We make it in terms of what we spend and what we build and how we operate. Nobody in the world in our physical businesses spends this much on technology. That is one of our competitive advantages on the physical business. We can do some very interesting things for you -- for storing a box of paper -- that can help you be compliant. Regulatory compliance and retention management, as you well know, is the name of the game today.

We have been building technology to help people deal with that in the paper space. The theories and the business process in the paper space convert well to the digital space, because you have to meet the same laws and regulations.

The other element that we bring is the ability to manage what we call cross-assets. You have information in a digital form, like emails covering a subject, and you may have something like an e-statement covering that same subject, and you may have paper records on that subject. You come to our Web site, and you can do a search, and you can see what you have as cross-assets, and you can manage the cross-assets, and you can respond to a client's request.

So the client can go to your Web site, do a search for a particular document or email, and ask for it?
Absolutely. In the physical business, you can come on our Web site, and you can search your database that we manage for you. It is typical Internet technology -- drop it in a shopping cart, place your order, and tell us how fast you want it. We might put it in a truck and get it to you in two hours at one price; put it in a truck and get it to you by the end of the day at another price. If you wait until tomorrow, there is another price. If you are really in a hurry, we will scan it -- it goes from paper to digital -- and have it on the Internet for you in a matter of few minutes. You pay for your delivery based upon speed.

Can you tell me anything about the amount of revenue you generated from digital?
In 2003, our total revenues worldwide were about a billion and a half, and our total digital revenues were $10m, maybe a little lower. We are just in the beginning stages.

We saw the vision and the need for this service, frankly maybe too early in the market. Everybody knows about Sarbanes-Oxley. What people do not know is that well before Sarbanes-Oxley, there were a whole host of trends all driving to the same place, and they all were driving toward more compliance obligations to keep more records.