Email and file archiving vendor Zantaz Inc. announced yesterday
that it has purchased its data classification and email policy
management partner, the privately held Singlecast, for an
undisclosed amount.
Zantaz, which offers onsite and outsourced email and file
archiving software and services, said Singlecast's software would
first be added to its email archiving products, but that it intends
to eventually add the intellectual property to its file archiving
and SharePoint archiving products as well.
The difference between Singlecast's software and products from
other data classification vendors, like Kazeon Inc. and Scentric
Corp., is that Singlecast can classify files and apply user
policies, both after the data is created or received (post review)
and automatically at the point it is created or received
(prereview).
This process works by communicating with the email archiving tool's
active monitoring adapters, which reside on servers or gateways,
according to Steve Reny, senior vice president of business process
and corporate development for Zantaz. These adapters communicate
with policy servers that contain content analysis and
classification engines.
"When a message is in transit, and if it triggers [a policy],
Zantaz can apply a workflow that instructs the server to conduct an
action on its behalf," Reny said. These actions include inserting a
classification as a tag in the message X-header (archival products
look at and use this tag), block the message, mark the message with
disclaimers or warnings, reroute the message or blind carbon copy
an individual in the organization.
Of the most interest to storage users is the fact that the
prereview process can, at least theoretically, help curb the growth
of email storage archives by preventing certain messages from ever
being stored.
"For example, customer X could create a policy that states that
if a user emails a file over 2 MB to more than two users, [the
Singlecast software should] block the message and notify the user
to post it … where it is not subject to long-term retention
policies," Reny said. "In a large organization, this could have
significant long-term storage savings."
"Data classification vendors, like Kazeon and Scentric, do
[classification] 'after the fact,' " said Brian Babineau, analyst
with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "This product can work
like a spam filter and can apply policies before the email is ever
committed to the messaging server."
Users can also choose to apply policies to the messages after
they are received by the messaging server, if that is their
preferences. Multiple policies can be applied to messages at once,
and each policy can be removed without affecting the others.
"For example, if you have five lawsuits all involving the same
person, and one is dropped, you can remove that one litigation hold
without affecting the other four," Reny said.
Finally, users can also set policies that prevent emails that
are not in compliance with regulations or company policies from
being sent, according to certain flagged keywords or communication
between certain groups of people. "The whole idea," according to
Reny, "is to stop something bad before it happens."
According to Babineau, Singlecast has two competitors with
similar capabilities, Orchestria Corp. and MessageGate Inc., each
of which has a partnership with Symantec Corp. Orchestria, the
biggest of the three companies, also has a partnership with IBM,
and MessageGate recently announced a new partnership with email
archiver AXS-One Inc. Such products are not necessarily mutually
exclusive to indexing and classification products like Kazeon's,
Babineau said. Singlecast can export its classification information
to Kazeon's repository.
Meanwhile, according to Babineau, users should be on the lookout
for more mergers of Singlecast's competitors with their email
archiving dance partners over the next 18 months.
"I think it comes down to convenience for the user," Babineau
said. "It will be easier for users to get classification and email
from one vendor, and this acquisition could act as an 'earthquake,'
setting off more consolidation in this space."