John Petruzzi had a job that, until recently, few people would envy.
As director of enterprise security at Constellation Energy, Petruzzi is the go-to guy whenever regulators request email records from the $12.5bn Baltimore utility and energy wholesaler. For years, Petruzzi has spent more than his fair share of weekends and long nights at the office, combing through terabytes of data on email servers.
"We're talking about large amounts of data: millions of emails over a three-to-six-month period among hundreds of employees," Petruzzi said. "It has been a rather arduous process, obviously. I had teams that worked days on end."
Similar complaints are spurring software entrepreneurs who focus on easing this kind of sleuthing. One of them is Aaref Hilaly, chief executive of Clearwell Systems. Hilaly says the time is ripe for innovation as lawyers, regulators and executives come to view email as a major source of evidence and facts.
Clearwell, a 30-person company in Santa Clara, California, launched this week with the official introduction of its product, the Clearwell Email Intelligence Platform. The product makes sifting through millions of emails to find relevant messages almost as easy as an Internet keyword search on Google, Hilaly said.
"The business climate has changed a lot in the last few years, post-Enron and post-Eliot Spitzer," said Hilaly, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur tapped by Sequoia Capital to run Clearwell. "Courts have become a lot more active. Email has come to be viewed as a source of truth. If you want to know what really happened, you look at the email. That's why companies are storing more and more of it, and referring back to it."
Hilaly sold his previous company, a software administration company called CentreRun, to Sun for $66m in 2003. Sequoia Capital, which has a $4m stake in Clearwell, also invested in that company.
A typical request for email in a legal discovery situation requires 1,300 hours of labour and costs more than $100,000, Clearwell estimated. With its software, Clearwell promises to shave off much of that cost and time. The company has applied for patents on its technology and is hoping it can grab the lead in an emerging market.
Other start-ups, including Orchestria in New York and MessageGate in Bellevue, Washington, offer email search tools.
Bigger players like Computer Associates, EMC, HP, IBM, Symantec and Zantaz already offer some basic search capabilities in their email archiving programs. For example, EMC touts its ability to search email, instant messages and other business data across multiple systems, including Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM Lotus Domino server. It's also readying a new legal investigator tool, which offers "evidence production" features, for release in a couple...
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...of months. However, the extra features can hike the price of its archiving system from $18 (£10) per email box to $150.
"Search is a hot topic these days," said Denise Reier, vice-president of enterprise archiving at EMC. "Search and discovery are both pretty hot."
Google, which makes a corporate search appliance, and Microsoft, which sells the most popular corporate email system, can't be ignored either. For instance, Google and EMC signed a new agreement last week that will add Google desktop search capabilities to EMC's software for managing corporate data. In August, Microsoft acquired FrontBridge, which made messaging security and archiving tools that Microsoft plans to incorporate into its Exchange Server email program.
Still, Clearwell has some unique advantages, analysts said. What stands out about the company is its ability to tap email in multiple places, including "active data stores", where new messages reside before they're archived. Another differentiating feature of the product is its message ranking system and its dashboard interface.
"What they're doing is quite interesting," said Michael Osterman, head of Osterman Research, which focuses on Internet messaging. "It's the next step beyond archiving."
That said, Osterman thinks Clearwell and others like it may have a difficult time selling their email archive add-ons, because a majority of companies don't do any archiving at all. The ones that do, mainly companies in regulated industries, tend to do only what the law requires. "The challenge is getting the market to appreciate the value of this," he said.
Constellation Energy, one of three or so initial Clearwell customers, is a fan. Email search requests that used to take days now take hours, Petruzzi said. Sifting through the email archive, a HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System, was "very manual and labour intensive" before he installed Clearwell last fall, he said. It had required a team of five or so people to grab and parse data.
Now, with the lighter workload, he said he expects to reassign two employees to other, more "strategic" work. That's a benefit for the company, because of intensified federal regulation.
To sort messages by relevance, Clearwell's program weighs the background data and content of each email for several factors, including the name of the sender, names of recipients, how many replies the message generated, who replied, how quickly replies came, how many times it was forwarded, attachments and, of course, keywords. The program can also focus searches on a particular department or office location. Filters remove redundant results.
"No other product really sits there and analyses properties of emails like we do," Hilaly said.
He said it takes only a few days to install and configure the software, which sits behind customers' firewalls. It took Constellation Energy just under 10 days from start to finish. It's designed to work with Microsoft Exchange, and it is also compatible with many of the major email archive programs. The starting price of the program is $50,000, which covers 100GB of email.
Gartner analyst Carolyn DiCenzo said customers can justify the cost of the product several ways. In addition to quick responses to investigations, executives can use the software to analyse their operations, because email holds many clues to customer, product and employee issues. Yet the pain of legal and regulatory investigations remains a lead selling point.
"The money is in legal discovery," she said. "You only have to win one lawsuit or prevent one and you pay for the technology."
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