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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has unveiled three new products that promise greater control and better management of unstructured data, along with faster data search and retrieval capabilities.
The Content Collection and Archiving software packages collect, classify and archive data, whether it’s files, instant messages or e-mail.
The goal? Shoring up e-discovery efforts and gaining efficiency around records management in light of a growing number of compliance mandates that require enterprises to protect and produce specific data files, IBM said.
Compliance mandates such as FRCP are helping to more than triple the $1.7 billion market for e-mail archiving technology by 2012, according to a recent Radicati study. As one pundit related, one legal e-discovery effort to provide one employee’s e-mail files, for example, could easily cost $50,000 to $100,000.
Many organizations’ needs have outgrown the limited business value of e-mail archiving, and they are seeking better control and management of their content in support of their business goals, said Ken Bisconti, a product and strategy vice president with IBM’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) group.
Enterprise content management software lets companies manage their unstructured content, which includes anything from electronic documents such as Web pages and spreadsheets to medical records and audio/video content.
The three products, which integrate with IBM’s ECM platform, include Content Collector for E-mail, Content Collector for File Systems and a Content Collector Enterprise Bundle that collects and manages a mix of content from e-mail and file systems such as Windows NTFS and SharePoint and can work on existing non-IBM ECM systems as well.
“E-mail still makes the business world go around, but unstructured data is under scrutiny, given compliance regs,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research. “IBM is building on what it’s done with its ECM platform to increase the granularity of data it can handle. Content management is a growing concern and IBM sees value in providing a flexible and powerful content management platform.”
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com
