Iron Mountain, once known primarily for its tape shipping
business, has been busy in recent months reinventing itself as an
onlinebackup and records management company.
The latest in its string of acquisitions and partnerships is a
records management services provider, Accutrac Software, for an
undisclosed sum.Accutrac's client-based software, Accutrac XE, performs
lifecycle management of records and will manage records at Iron
Mountain, as well as customer sites, according to a company press
release. Automation tools within the software include indexing and
classification; location tracking; discovery, search, query and
filtering tools; and retention management, legal holds, archiving
and disposition/destruction reporting.
Iron Mountain is far from alone among storage companies responding
to the need for better records management in light of e-discovery
and
data compliance issues. EMC acquired Documentum in 2003. CA .
acquired records management player MDY Group International last
June. Xiotech reinvented itself with a compliance focus,
re-emerging in August following its acquisition of Daticon for $30
million in January. For its part, Xiotech has announced that it is
winning deals against Iron Mountain, in particular in the
e-discovery space.
Iron Mountain began stepping up its focus on records management
in March when it partnered with managed messaging service provider
MessageOne Inc. for email archiving and has continued with the
acquisition of Middlebury, Conn.-based archiving and records
management outsourcer ArchivesOne Inc. in May.
ArchivesOne deals primarily with inactive physical records,
according to Matt Kivlin, director of product marketing, records
management solutions for Iron Mountain. Accutrac deals with both
active and inactive physical records, which Kivlin said was the
primary driver of the acquisition, but its software also manages
electronic records including email, office documents and images,
which Kivlin said Iron Mountain also has plans to integrate.
While Iron Mountain plans to continue "business as usual" for
the physical records side of the business, it's less clear on how
the integration into its digital services businesses will work.
"It's very early into the acquisition -- the next quarter or so
we'll have a better picture as to how it will help us unify storage
management for electronic records." Ultimately, Kivlin said, Iron
Mountain is envisioning a unified service for not only multiple
kinds of electronic records, but for managing both physical and
electronic records together.
According to Stephanie Balaouras, senior analyst with Forrester
Research Inc., the trend is springing from a changing role for
records management and storage in enterprise environments. "Records
management and enterprise content management are morphing into a
concept that Forrester calls retention management -- managing all
records, as well as content (email, files etc.), from a single pane
of glass where retention policies are set."
With the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, according to
Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for compliance infrastructure
at IDC, users need an integrated view of records, both active and
inactive, and both on site and off site. This is the capability
Accutrac's software will add to Iron Mountain's offering, she said.
"Iron Mountain needs to figure out how to integrate their storage
and records management services and how to fold them in to their
digital services business -- it's critical they keep key people in
management and research and development."
If that integration is successful, Tero predicted that it will
find a market at the very high end, where very large companies
facing many lawsuits and compliance with multiple industry
regulations are beginning to demand that records management, email
archiving, file archiving and storage systems or services become
one and the same. "Most archiving and compliance systems aren't
integrated that way yet," Tero said. "But the new e-discovery rules
require an integrated view so users know how to access all their
information for legal and compliance requests."
Balaouras said managed services offerings could also be
appealing at the other end of the market for small businesses
looking for someone to take the burden of compliance archiving off
the hands of a small IT staff. "If you're a significantly large
enterprise, you'll attempt to do this yourself, but for small
enterprises, and small and medium businesses, I think online
services are not only less complex from a deployment point of view,
but you also have the peace of mind of transferring at least some
of the risk of adequately storing this critical information to the
service provider."