Doubling down on a bluff

Phil Myers, StoredIQ CEO

HP acquisition of Autonomy great for the Information Management market … but a risky ‘all in’ move for the participants

The World Series of Poker 2011 has just wound down in Las Vegas.  Yesterday, HP & Autonomy moved the game to the Bay Area.

There is an age-old wisdom in poker that there is a strategy for betting a bluff.  And it seems like it really applies here in spades to HP & Autonomy.  The saying is this: ‘If you bluff at the pot, you better be willing to follow it up and put all your money at risk’.  I’m reminded of that as I watched the stunning move HP made to acquire Autonomy.  Spending $10.4B of the ~$12.9B they have in cash is truly an ‘all in’ move. 

But, is it a wise one?  Or, a bluff that every other vendor will now call? 

First, the good news.  This is GREAT news for everyone who has spent the past five years pushing the Information Management marketplace, trying to get enterprises to prioritize getting their petabytes of information in order BEFORE they jump into fire fighting in eDiscovery, compliance or any other issue that demanded real-time, relevant information to make decisions. Several thought leaders, most notably Deb Logan at Gartner and George Socha with the EDRM group have been forecasting an organizational shift based on a growing wisdom that the cost, complexity and risk that corporations have is just too high without good information management and governance solutions. 

This acquisition clearly validates the value of this shift and a perspective shift in how this problem needs to be solved.  

HP has now bet their businesses on the approach of ‘proactive information management’ is the winning hand in the Big Data market. 

We believe their intentions and this latest merger will trigger a firestorm in the space that will be healthy for customers, vendors and solution providers.  History tells us so.  In almost any market that developed into a BIG space, there was a point in time where an outbreak that was almost a religious war provided a catalyst.  Think the relational wars between Ingres and Oracle, the systems management wars between Tivoli and CA, the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape, the CRM wars between Siebel and Salesforce.com or even the search wars between Google and Yahoo. This acquisition provides a platform for some major conflict.  

So, what does this all mean to the rest of us?  We think it means we’re at the beginning of a paradigm shift and the best thing we can all do is prepare well for the change. They don’t pay us to be expert analysts (and we’re not) but from our seat, here are the Top 10 things that we believe will happen next: 

Top 10 Things that this Acquisition will Trigger

1. Vendors competing in Information Discovery, Governance or Management will add indexing engines to their products to compete with Autonomy.
2. CIOs will drive a shift to prioritizing Proactive Information Management vs. Reactive eDiscovery solutions.  
3. Scale will be the new IT benchmark … ‘last year’s news’ on data sampling and predictive coding will be replaced by how much data your engine can analyze. 
4. Customers will move towards establishing Information Management standards in terms of people, process and technologies.
5. A new IT Service will emerge around providing real-time ‘information intelligence’.
6. SIs and SPs will begin to build practices around Information Management.  
7. Executives will demand answers to ‘Big Data’ problems from their CIOs. 
8. Boards will require reports on how governance standards are being adhered to. 
9. Mirror-image Cloud-based services will emerge to provide tactical stop-gap solutions for a plethora of Information Management applications. 
10. Some business will create a competitive advantage that moves them from one of the pack to a leader in their industry based on the sophistication of the ability to discover, govern and make decisions faster based on their insight into Big Data. 

Now for the bad news.  And maybe a gratitutous eleventh forecast.  HP will struggle mightily with integrating Autonomy if they can even get shareholder approval for it (does this seem like Compaq déjà vu or what?) before ultimately creating the analogous version of OpenView for Information Management.  Only this time maybe it will be called ‘CloseView’ given the proprietary nature of Autonomy? 

And one last piece of perhaps self-serving forecast.  There were only two vendors in this space who built their business with the philosophy of building an information management platform capable of managing enterprise-scale data volumes in the petabytes of size … Autonomy and StoredIQ.  One took a closed approach and stitched together many acquired pieces to create a beast of a platform that only a vendor like HP could sell.  The other took a lean and mean approach to providing a simple, scalable and open platform that will embrace 100’s to 1000’s of partners to scale it.  It’s a model that every other winner has used before.

Aces in the hole here in Austin?

Using Data Mapping and Assessment to Minimize eDiscovery Cost and Risk

Last week Dennis Kiker contributed an interesting article to Law Technology News entitled How To Manage ESI To Rein In Runaway Costs. At the heart of the problem is that we’re a country of corporate data hoarders. We keep data past its expiration; we don’t have a good system in place for categorizing and managing it, and are overwhelmed when a legal request necessitates identifying and collecting data relevant to a case. Dennis states:

Despite the high cost of its painstaking preservation and storage, much of this data will never be relevant to any legal case. Indeed, according to a 2009 survey by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, 60 to 80 percent of the information retained by corporations in America has no value from a business or legal perspective.

Legal departments have historically focused on the ‘right side’ of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) – the analysis and review stages. However, if the quality of collected data in the review platform is unnecessary, insufficient, spoiled, or irrelevant; this significantly increases an organization’s legal cost and risk.

Kiker goes on to say… the best approach for many companies is to get serious about cleaning up their information environments. By “taking out the trash” in a major way, companies stand to make big cuts in their annual data-storage bills, which can also run into the six figures. This also enables them to more quickly and more accurately identify potentially relevant information for the attorneys to sift through during a review process, potentially lowering their legal bills.

Legal teams are increasingly realizing the business value and ROI from strengthening their company’s ‘left-side’ EDRM capabilities and understand that sound information governance practices result in highly targeted and effective eDiscovery.

The article points out that shrinking the overall stack of data is a good start to minimizing eDiscovery costs, but companies also need to find all the relevant information contained in their data. He says:

Data mapping offers a way to solve this problem. The basic idea is to create a master index that spells out exactly where content is stored. Surprisingly, many companies have never taken this critical information management step.

In fact, Barry Murphy was reflecting on the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Conference and commented in his blog: Get specific. Know where data lives and do the data maps.  It’s impossible to preserve data if you don’t know where it is.

At StoredIQ we couldn’t agree more. To prove it, during the month of August, StoredIQ is extending a promotional offer for our data assessment and mapping service. The first 10 qualified companies will pay only $10,000, a savings of $5,000 off list price.

StoredIQ Data Assessment Services provide unprecedented visibility into the unstructured data across the enterprise. This invaluable service quickly gives organizations critical understanding of their business content to make more informed decisions about the management, retention, and disposition of their data.

To learn more about this offer and to take the first step toward managing your escalating ESI-related costs and risk – contact us today!

Upcoming New FINRA Regulations… Are You Ready?

Amendments to broker-dealer books and records requirements under FINRA 4511 and 4512, take effect December 5, 2011. The new rules require member firms to make and preserve certain books and records to show their compliance with securities laws, rules and regulations. These requirements will undoubtedly impact ongoing records management and retention processes for broker-dealers, as well as impact future FINRA audits and legal discovery requests.

Planning for FINRA Compliance
With the effective date only a few months away, broker-dealers will need to be prepared to show updated policies and procedures with supporting systems to be ready for their 2012 FINRA audit. Compliance officers should ask:

• Do we have the systems capabilities in place to identify, track and preserve the required records?
• Is now a good time to perform a holistic data assessment review of the information and records your firm currently has stored across all data repositories, content management systems and archives?
• Are you able to implement defensible data deletion policies as prescribed by the new FINRA requirements?
  Can your current data storage and archiving capabilities withstand the volumes for day-to-day reporting and historical archiving? If not, how can you strategically clean up your data storage?
• Will new technologies be needed to assist, and what does the implementation timetable look like to be in compliance by December?

Meeting FINRA Requirements with StoredIQ
StoredIQ’s Information Governance solution provides broker-dealers with a comprehensive, secure and efficient approach to meeting their FINRA information governance needs. With StoredIQ, companies can manage risk and contain costs by leveraging automated compliance and governance policies.  The result is an efficient and cost-effective answer for today’s highly regulated business world.

By implementing StoredIQ now and planning accordingly, broker-dealers can be in compliance by the December 5th FINRA implementation date and ready for a 2012 FINRA audit examination.

To learn more, download the StoredIQ FINRA Solution Sheet or contact us for more information.