Nuclear shelter turns to email
Published: 01 Jun 2004 12:00 BST
Customers now all understand that they have a problem. They are running around, scratching their heads. They do not know how to solve the problem, and the market has not yet settled down as to what a right approach is. What is an appropriate email retention policy? The answer is up in the air, and different companies have taken different approaches. But it will all settle down, and some of it will settle down through lawsuits and further regulations and so forth.
The question really is how tight versus loose you are going to start having to save these emails -- or what is going to count as a document that falls under the regulations. Absolutely. For the Securities and Exchange Commission-regulated companies, it is very clear. You have got to keep all client-related business email for three years. But for the general corporate public, it is more of: What did you say in the email? Because regulation speaks of keeping information based upon its subject matter content, not based up on its context or its format. And as you know, most people do not write memos at all, and almost as few write letters. It is all going out through email. So there is a lot of content going through the email system that is subject to regulation. The trouble is capturing them.
Do you guys have some of that intelligence software that tries to analyse the content in email?
People have played with that so far, but to my knowledge, nobody is making that work yet. It may happen one day, but nobody has gotten there yet.
When do you expect to recoup the investment from your digital-services businesses?
We are nowhere near close to recouping the investments. I mean, we are two to three years out, probably, from breaking even. Look, this is a new market, and we have learned a lot in it.
Everybody in the technology space today is talking about doing this. Most of them talk about doing retention and archiving, and in spite of technology doing the job, it is hard to do archiving when you are doing lots of terabytes. We think that an offsite model has some advantages, but look, a lot of customers would want to do it themselves, and we certainly see that happening.
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