Information management and storage company EMC launched two new archiving products yesterday in an effort to solve archiving problems at companies, especially those in the financial services industry.
 
The two products, one for archive services for e-mail and one for archive services for reports come on the heels of a spate of lawsuits, investigations and fines for compliance violations related to e-mail.
 
The now available software is not necessarily brand new; but has been available through EMC as a suite of products; the new products for the first time integrate the applications to ease compliance needs, the company said.
 
"Now we're using a common infrastructure so companies can have a common archiving approach for retention, access, deletion and so on," said Whitney Tidmarsh, v.p. strategic marketing initiatives. "That's the part that is actually quite revolutionary."
 
The benefits to this approach, Tidmarsh said, extend beyond functionality – relieving overloaded e-mail systems that clog queues, slow down machine performance and make it difficult to find information.
"In the case of a company faced with a lawsuit or discovery motion around a lawsuit, it needs to go out and collect relevant information across silos, and archiving becomes very difficult – a real problem." An employee ends up "with a lot of information that they could get rid of that remains on the system as a potential liability."

 
Investment and retail banks and insurance companies are among the customers eager for the release of the new offerings, Tidmarsh said, as they are "all very concerned about SOX, 17A4, e-mail correspondence. Particularly e-mail correspondence is a big concern. Companies subject to litigation are very keen on this; compliance is a key theme here."
 
Tidmarsh said the fragmented data storage market is to blame for the delay in launching such products.
 
"Most companies are still looking at this from an application perspective," she says. "What you see are very focused solutions that don't have the wherewithal to have this kind of unique, common backbone behind these different kinds of archiving applications. There are vendors, for example, that do nothing but e-mail archiving."
 
The products have been in the development stage for the last two years, and are the result of a synergy between inhouse development and various recently acquired technologies.