Taking the terror out of terabytes
A company gets a request for documents as part of a legal discovery process. Its paper documents are stored offsite in chronological order. The problem: They take up hundreds of boxes. And the company must respond to the request in 72 hours.
Members of a work team need to share access to a paper document. As they push it through the team chain, it gets fedexed and faxed and sometimes lost, in a process that the Gartner Group cites as 24 times more expensive than electronic transmission.Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. just celebrated its first billion-dollar software quarter as a result of addressing problems like these. With its $275-million acquisition of San Diego-based Captiva, as well as acquisitions of other information-management software firms, it has increased its reach from data storage to information lifecycle management, or ILM.
"We look at Captiva as the technology that turns paper into an instantly usable business asset," says Whitney Tidmarsh, vice president, Strategic Marketing Initiatives, EMC Software Group.
EMC’s purchase of Captiva, which closed Dec. 30, brings EMC a further step into the ILM field. Captiva, EMC and Documentum, acquired by EMC in 2003, had partnered for 10 years. Captiva’s system digitally captures paper documents, classifies them and routes them for archiving. Combining the companies under the EMC umbrella addresses a growing push from IT professionals to reduce the number of vendors they manage, Tidmarsh says.
Boston Capital, a real estate finance company investing in both affordable and market-rate property, has used a Captiva-Documentum application since February 2003 to scan business documents. At the time, Boston Capital had 2,000 deals under management, all stored in paper binders at both its Boston headquarters and an offsite location, says IT Director Brian Madden.
The first task was to convert the paper documents into searchable electronic format. The second was to manage updated versions of the documents as staffers and outside professionals worked with them. The system captures and scans in multiple drafts, along with handwritten notes in the margins, and consistently supplies the most current document.
Since adopting the technology, Boston Capital has reduced its file space to one-third the square footage of before, despite adding another 500 properties, Madden says. The company is also saving on retrieval costs with its offsite storage vendor. Madden estimates that Boston Capital scanned 1.6 million pages in 2005.
As storage costs rise into the millions of dollars for Fortune-500 companies and into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for smaller companies, IT specialists raise the question of how, and how much, of the data really needs to be stored, and for how long.
Stephen Foskett is director of strategic services for GlassHouse Technologies, a Framingham-based enterprise storage company. While companies want to increase the effectiveness of their use of storage, "they know they’re using a 55 gallon drum to store 30 gallons," he says. GlassHouse’s 2006 Budget Survey Results study shows that companies are trying to find less expensive storage devices for old or low-priority documents. But, he says, they should also explore whether they need all that data to begin with.
"There’s going to come a time when we’re going to cross a line and companies are going to realize that they can’t save money on unit costs and utilization of assets," he says.
"Nobody’s going to ever be 100 percent digital," says Brian Babineau, research analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group in Boston, which covers EMC but whose staff doesn’t hold stock in the company. Some applications will have a paper component, with customers able to choose which legacy or traditional application for which they want the Captiva system. With retrieval and storage systems being scaled down to fit the desk and budget of a small-to-mid-sized business, – and with EMC beginning to target that market – more customers will have more choices in the near term.
"It’s a very different place than where EMC was five years ago," Tidmarsh says. "And we’ve come a long way."
Christina P. O’Neill can be reached at coneill@wbjournal.com
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments