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Scentric came out of stealth mode on Wednesday with an information classification and management (ICM) product that the company says is the first to offer universal classification across all data types.
ICM is a subset of information lifecycle management (ILM) that proponents say could make ILM at the file level a reality. The technology has even attracted interest from Google, among others.
Scentric says its flagship solution, Scentric Destiny, is the first to free enterprises from focusing on a single data type such as files, e-mails or databases, an approach the startup says can result in operational complexity and large information gaps. Scentric claims Destiny is also the first classification product built for scale and performance in large, distributed enterprise environments, with a user interface designed for collaboration among business, compliance and IT managers.
“Scentric Destiny raises the bar in the information classification and management market with classification across all data types, enterprise class scalability and performance, and a highly intuitive user interface,” states Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at the Taneja Group. “Scentric Destiny makes it possible for business users and IT administrators to collaborate on solving increasingly complex compliance, legal and storage infrastructure challenges. It is an impressive accomplishment by a very solid team of data and storage management veterans.”
Scentric was co-founded by CTO Hemant Kurande, who served in the same roles at Storability Software. Vice president of engineering Paul Ignatius hails from CA and CommVault, and CEO Sanjay Sehgal served as COO and CEO at iVivity.
Scentric says Destiny can help address critical data management problems ranging from legal discovery and risk management to optimization of the storage infrastructure through its automated data-tiering features. The collaborative user interface can help bridge data management issues that cross boundaries of responsibility and knowledge between IT and business users.
“Scentric’s classification approach, from content and metadata indexing to automated, policy-based data movement, helps customers address fundamental information and storage management challenges and makes it suitable for applications ranging from compliance to tiered storage,” said Laura DuBois, IDC’s research director for storage software.
Scentric’s universal classification catalog includes key infrastructure information to allow the logical mapping of critical hardware infrastructure to the business processes and departments that it supports; file, e-mail and database metadata to allow classification by tags like file owner or e-mail sender; file and e-mail content to allow classification of data at the information level, such as documents or e-mails that contain Social Security Numbers or certain keyword; and organizational groupings to allow for classification based on departments, business units or key business processes.
Scentric says this approach allows for the creation of flexible rules to classify data into data sets that reflect corporate structures and business processes and define multiple views of corporate data for a variety of purposes from simple tiering to more complex tasks like regulatory compliance and archiving.
The company claims Destiny is the first product to combine a classification engine with a policy-based data movement framework. In the first release, it can handle major sources of explosive data growth such as Microsoft Windows, NAS storage, Microsoft Exchange and SQLServer. Future releases will add support for additional platforms and data sources.
Scentric Destiny has been in development for 18 months, including a six month beta cycle that will be completed this month, but the company isn’t discussing customers yet. The product will be commercially available starting April 24.
Scentric also announced the expansion of its Series A funding round to $10.4 million from HIG Ventures, Valhalla Partners, Imlay Investments and ATDC.
