...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."
