The Fortiva Blog

Wondering how you can afford to go green? Get your numbers straight.

Posted by Justin Wiebe, Fortiva Operations

Given my posting last month on green computing, I found the following statistic based on a new survey by McKinsey and Co. quite interesting.  Apparently, the world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020.

In my previous post, I wrote about efforts taken by Fortiva to reduce our overall infrastructure power consumption. This has had the dual benefit of reducing both our impact on the environment and our cost of doing business. Since then, I have been thinking more about the challenges of justifying green computing from a dollars and cents perspective.

Until recently, I have rarely been able to create a positive Return On Investment (ROI) for new hardware purchases, especially those related to green computing. It turns out that all along I was missing something – that dollar amount that pushes the cost of existing systems over the top and reduces the payback to less than 3 years (sound familiar?). And what is that key? Power – more importantly, the cost of the power used over its lifetime by the piece of hardware you want to replace. As noted by Mark Monroe, Director of Sustainable Computing at Sun, rarely are power costs included in the IT budget.

Here at Fortiva, we try to roll all of our data center costs into one number. By adding up all co-location costs, power costs, cooling costs and miscellaneous data center costs (but not bandwidth costs) and then dividing this number by the useable power, we obtain the monthly $/VA  cost (or approximately $/W). By then determining the amount of power (VA or W) used by each server, we can calculate the cost per month to keep the server up and running. A sample of the calculation may look something like this:

Co-location Cost ($/VA) * Power Used by Server (VA ) * Server Life = Cost to Run Server

With the cost of power increasing almost everywhere, the Cost To Run Server is approaching the Cost To Buy Server. At Fortiva, the cost of hosting our dual-cpu servers for three years is approximately 75% of the total cost to purchase the server. If you stretch the life of the server out to five years, it actually costs more to host the server than to buy it.

So what should you do now? Try the following:

1 – Determine Co-Location Costs:

• Check your contracts. If you outsource your co-location facilities, you may be able to calculate the $/VA cost from your contracts.
• Talk to your finance department. If you manage your own co-location facilities, see if you can find out the costs of power, maintenance, security, on-call personnel, etc. Remember, your Co-Location Cost is the total of the costs to run the data center, divided by the useable amount of power.

2 – Determine Power Used by Server:

• Get yourself a good power meter and find out how much power your servers actually consume when idle and when under load. The numbers provided by the manufacturers tend not to reflect how you use the servers on a daily basis.

3 – Get out the spreadsheet and start crunching the numbers.

Try calculating the ROI on consolidating some of your existing servers onto virtual machines, or replacing some of your older machines with more energy-efficient models. You’ll probably be surprised by the results.

Hopefully these numbers can provide you with a better understanding of the true cost of your IT infrastructure. Who knows, they may also help you reduce your overall power consumption, justify some new hardware, or even help you justify outsourcing to someone who already has.

Approach 1: Mailbox Archiving (Part 2 of 4)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Management

In a previous post, I introduced the idea that there are multiple approaches to archiving.  In this post, I will dive more deeply into one of the two most common approaches, known as mailbox archiving, including how it works and what problems it is best suited to address.

Mailbox archiving is the process of periodically connecting to a user’s mailbox and looking for content that matches some criteria (an archiving policy) and adding it to the archive.  While a mailbox archiving process might run on a nightly basis, typically the archiving policies are set to only store messages that are older than a certain age (typically 30-90 days).

Strengths

• Visibility to all content and state information in the mailbox
  By connecting directly to the user’s mailbox, the archiving system can see (and choose to capture) any type of content, including calendar events, that wouldn’t be sent to another user.  Similarly, they can capture which folder the user has put the item into.
• Ability to modify messages in the mailbox
  With direct access to the user’s mailbox, the original message can be modified (flagged), deleted or replaced with a pointer to the copy in the archive.
• Easy to provide end-user access
  As the archive knows which mailbox it found a message in, it can easily provide the appropriate security controls to provide users with access to the messages in their mailbox without granting access to other messages.

Weaknesses

• Incomplete set of messages are captured
  Similar to backups, any periodic snapshot activity cannot record things that arrived and were subsequently deleted between capture cycles.  Given that users read and then deleted over 50% of messages on the day they receive them, periodic capture will miss the majority of mail – even if the archiving policy is set to capture messages immediately. 
• Incomplete picture of each message’s recipients
  When a user receives a message they have no visibility to the set of recipients that were BCC’d.  In addition, if the message was sent to a distribution list, the actual set of recipients isn’t stored with the message.  In the period between message receipt and capture, the membership of the distribution list can change materially (or the distribution list can be deleted from the mail system entirely).
• Duplicate message removal is very difficult
  While digital signatures can be used to find and remove duplication of message bodies and attachments to optimize the storage within the archive, removing duplication of the messages themselves is difficult because the set of recipients may be different and the meta data about when a message was received will vary from mailbox to mailbox.  When performing legal discovery across a set of users, duplicate copies of messages from different user’s mailboxes dramatically increases the costs of reviewing messages to be produced for opposing counsel.

Appropriate Uses of Mailbox Archiving

Bested suited for: Mailbox Storage Management
Mailbox archiving is appropriate for active mailbox storage management. A significant advantage -  mailbox archiving systems can “stub” or “shortcut” messages so that users don’t need to change their behavior to access historical mail. It is important to note, however, that without an active process that removes content from user’s mailbox, an archive only aids in storage management if combined with tight mailbox quotas – requiring users to spend hours each month on manual cleanup tasks.

Not appropriate for: Legal Discovery or Regulatory Compliance
Since mailbox archiving does not ensure the archiving all messages, nor does it provide a complete view of all message traffic, it is not suitable to address legal discovery or regulatory compliance requirements.

SaaS vs Software for Vendors – Lesson #1: Product Management Is Not Just About Features & Benefits

Posted by Paul Chen, President, Managed Services

In my last post, I talked about a number of traditional software vendors are now entering (or considering entering) the growing SaaS market. I also noted that while the two models (SaaS and traditional software) appear similar on the surface, there are significant differences between the two business models that require you to approach them in very different ways. Today, I’m going to share one of the three key lessons I’ve learned about building a SaaS business, and explain why in my opinion, it’s critical to success.

Before founding Fortiva, I started a company called FloNetwork, a very early example of a SaaS company that offered an email marketing automation service (FloNetwork was ultimately purchased by DoubleClick). Back then, one of our bigger customers came to us with a specific product feature request. It was a fairly basic addition for us, and something that we could easily pull together to make the client happy – so we did. Soon, a lot of other customers wanted the same functionality, so one by one, we added it for them.

Before long, we found ourselves with an operational nightmare on our hands. Since we made the change on a case-by-case basis, any overall product upgrades or backend changes required us to individually check and make fixes to those customers that had the feature in place – and each fix was slightly different.

Looking back, we could have avoided this problem by following a few simple rules:

1. Never offer “one-off” custom features
2. All feature changes should be developed with scalability and large-scale adoption in mind
3. Consider long-term support of any product changes
4. The product scope doesn’t end “at shipment” – it encompasses the life of the solution, including all operational and support requirements
5. Keep it simple

Unlike with traditional software, adding a feature is not simply a matter of identifying a customer need, building it, testing it, and deploying it. Instead, it requires a long-term approach that takes into consideration future support requirements, operational needs, scalability, and the potential impact on future product upgrades.

Ultimately, within a SaaS environment, the scope of all product management decisions should include the impact on the vendor – not just the impact on the customer.

SaaS Archiving for Large Enterprises – Beating On-Premise Solutions on Performance & Price

Posted by Eric Goodwin, CEO

When most people think of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), they associate it with small and medium businesses. While it’s true that SMBs make up a large part of the overall market for SaaS, it’s important not to underestimate the impact SaaS is having on larger enterprises as well. At Fortiva, our market consists exclusively of mid-to-large enterprises, and we’ve seen the demand for “cloud computing” increase significantly among the largest enterprises over the past year. In fact, we have worked with our partners to sign multiple global accounts with well over 10,000 mailboxes in the past few months alone.

There are a number of reasons for this growth in the enterprise space – at a high level, CIOs are realizing that in many cases, it makes more sense to take advantage of the expertise that a SaaS provider can offer, rather than trying to maintain a high level of IT expertise on-premise for all applications (which is increasingly impossible).

At Fortiva, we’ve worked hard to ensure that we can compete head-on with on-premise solutions on both features and security. Arguably though, our success in the enterprise market has been due in large part to two key things: low TCO and high performance. As Gartner analysts noted in their Outsourcing E-Mail Archiving, 1Q08 Update, Fortiva’s SaaS email archive is the lowest-priced managed offering on the market today – something we’re committed to maintaining without compromising on features or performance.

Keeping these commitments on price and performance while taking on more and more global enterprises means that we need to make ongoing improvements “behind the scenes” here at Fortiva. Today, we announced some of those changes in a press release, including dramatic performance improvements to our archiving solution that will allow up to 12-times faster processing for email, as well as greater efficiencies in the indexing of data and the application of policies to archived messages.

I think it’s important to realize that we never formally announce the majority of upgrades and improvements we make to our solution – they simply happen and are deployed to our customers without their knowledge. As our customer base continues to grow with the addition of much larger enterprises, we’re able to continually take advantage of greater economies of scale and newer hardware technologies, which in turn lower our costs to serve. The result is a solution that offers better performance than can be achieved with on-premise solutions, at a lower cost and without the headaches of managing a growing storage archive on a day-to-day basis.

The full release with all the details is posted on the Fortiva site.

Preparing for FRCP – Basic Steps for IT and Legal (Part 1 in a Series)

Posted by Alan Armstrong, VP Business Development

I described earlier how the lawyers for Qualcomm found themselves in very hot water earlier this year. When lawyers get sanctioned, the water is very very hot. As that case continues through the court I would like to look at the wider trends: how are companies responding to the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), and what practical measures can your company take to protect yourselves against the courts, who have become increasingly demanding about email and other e-Discovery requests.

While I’m not a lawyer, and I certainly don’t claim to be offering legal advice, I have spent a lot of time working with customers to understand the changes to the FRCP amendments and what they mean. At Fortiva, we’ve also researched how these changes are impacting businesses through independent surveys. We recently shared this information in a webcast, and based on the positive feedback, I decided it might be helpful to put it into a series of posts that will start by covering overall market trends (this article), followed by an in-depth look at the three critical areas of FRCP compliance (in future posts):

1. Enforcing retention policy
2. Litigation hold
3. Collection, search, and retrieval

For each of these areas, I will describe what the law requires, what our industry surveys tell us about what your peers are doing, and some best practices. Finally, I will wrap up the series with some thoughts on how to overcome the barriers to getting your company ready for e-Discovery.

But first let’s return to the Qualcomm case. This case is significant on its own, with its high profile and high impact to the individual lawyers, but more than that it seems to be part of a wider trend where the courts have lost patience with companies claiming ignorance or citing prohibitive costs for e-Discovery requests. Over the past year, Fortiva commissioned two surveys (March 2007 Survey & November 2007 Survey ) that measured the ongoing impact of the changes to FRCP in December 2006, and the results are quite dramatic:

	In March 2007	By January 2008
No email retention policy	46%	13%
Unprepared for FRCP	94%	33%
No litigation hold process	91%	28%

Companies don’t take steps like this because they enjoy it; compliance rarely drives revenue, but as the courts have started to enforce the new rules, the financial and other costs of non-compliance have forced companies to get ready. Our January survey found that average litigation costs (excluding settlement costs and judgments) exceeded $200,000 for 51% of organizations, with 8% putting that cost at over $1M. A full 20% of companies have settled a case to avoid the cost of search and recovery of email.

A few other stats that should be cause for concern:

• 35% are not confident that emails are fully reviewed to ensure attorney-client privilege is not waived before being sent to opposing counsel during Discovery
• 47% of respondents do not agree that their legal team can effectively review relevant email in the 99-day window before the meet and confer session
• The majority of businesses have recognized the potentially negative impact e-discovery requests can have, and are doing something about it. Based on the survey, the majority of businesses are now actively taking steps to reduce their risk, meet the FRCP requirements and improve their e-discovery processes.

Is your legal team waiting for fines or sanctions to get prepared? Our surveys indicate that the majority of businesses now recognize the negative potential impacts that e-discovery requests can have and are now actively taking steps to reduce their risk. If yours is not, you’ll soon be in the minority; FRCP compliance is quickly becoming standard operating procedure.

But if you haven’t yet covered your bases, I hope you find this series of articles helps to provide some pragmatic steps to do so.

Understanding the Different Approaches to Archiving Email (Part 1 of 4)

Posted by Rick Dales, VP Product Marketing

Discussing email archiving can be challenging, because the phrase “email archiving” is interpreted in very different ways, based upon the set of problems users are trying to address. Similarly, dedicated email archiving systems are not alike, and may offer different approaches to archiving.

Before selecting an email archive, it’s important to first understand the fundamental differences between these different approaches. Each one has pros and cons, depending on your archiving goals. These goals typically include (in no particular order): 

1.  Providing a central, searchable, deduplicated repository of email data to use for the enforcement of litigation hold orders and the execution of legal discovery requests
2.  Provision of a systematic review process to monitor content sent/received by regulated employees (generally this is only in the financial services space)
3. Providing easy access for users to their historical mail for productivity purposes, without keeping all of the mail on the production mail system
4. Maintaining access to historical information when employees leave the organization

As I will explain over my next few posts, each of the current archiving approaches has limitations when trying to address all of these challenges. As a result, the selection of an email archiving system must first consider the best archiving approach to achieve your goals. Given that these goals can be in conflict, it will be equally important to prioritize your objectives and decide which items you are willing to make compromises on.

 In my next few blog posts, I will provide a high-level overview of the main archiving approaches, outlining the pros and cons of each, from my perspective. (full disclosure: Fortiva uses a journaled archiving approach)

Insights into Building a Winning SaaS Sales Organization

Posted by Craig Rennick, Founder and VP Sales

I’ve been working for SaaS start-ups for 10 years – a long period of time.  In fact before the term SaaS became in vogue we were called Application Service Providers or Managed Service Providers.  Regardless, at FloNetwork I drove sales to $30 million in revenue in less than 3 years and now at Fortiva we’re on a similar journey.  I’ve built sales teams for direct and channel and I’ve built the professional services teams in both environments.  I’ve learned a few things that I’d like to pass along what I hope will help you build a winning SaaS organization.

1. A track record of success in a service environment is the most important credential to look for when hiring people.  I’ve found that some people excel working together in a highly charged customer environment and some don’t.  I’ve made the mistake in the past of hiring senior talent with great credentials but who just couldn’t make the transition.  You’re usually better off to promote the winners you’ve already got as opposed to bringing in new talent.
2. Culture is critical and building an environment of passionate and like-minded individuals makes all the difference in the world.  In a SaaS organization we rally to the customer’s requirements – which never stop.  As much as we draw the line between hunters and farmers we all work together for a common cause – a great customer experience.  When someone’s people skills and conduct are less than professional and self-serving it takes its toll across the entire organization so make sure you deal with it quickly.
3. Reps need to be clever and intelligent.  Similar to sales reps at any organization they must be clever enough to learn the product and handle themselves in challenging customer situations.  However, I would argue that in a SaaS organization Reps need to have a higher sense of empathy, patience and appreciation for many more of the customer’s issues and concerns than in a pure sales environment.  SaaS reps cannot be programmed and trained and then sent to the field following the formula – it doesn’t work.  For a rep to excel in a SaaS company they must be well-grounded and rounded; they need to possess a level of intelligence that grasps many issues at once while always building a strong customer relationship overtime.  These are very special people – and difficult to find.

Note to Vendors: Please Help Us Be Green

Posted by Justin Wiebe, Fortiva Operations

I recently returned from a trip to Europe where I visited data centers in several countries. Almost everyone talked about the environment, carbon neutral computing and the possibility of governments starting to tax businesses based on their computing carbon footprint. This was a refreshing contrast to my experiences in North America where there is lots of press about ‘Green Computing’, but not too much action.

Here at Fortiva, we have been putting a lot of emphasis on minimizing our footprint. Not just because it is good for the environment, but also because the economics make sense. Over the past few years, we have managed to reduce our power consumption in a number of different ways:

• Using AMD processors and lower-power SATA drives has allowed us to reduce our power usage per GB stored from 0.2 W to 0.05 W
• Virtualization in our Development and QA environments has reduced the number of servers by approximately one-fifth. 
• Investing in remote management solutions reduces the number of visits we make to our data centers.
• And, as I opened with, we are looking into our vendor’s  ’greenness ‘.

Looking at this list of changes, it seems like we have made a lot of progress over the past few years. Unfortunately, it still feels like we have a long way to go. I have come up with a wish list of changes I would like to see our vendors make to help us achieve our goals:

• Ship less junk with each server:  For every server we receive, we probably throw away a third of the total weight shipped. Packaging, cable management kits, mounting brackets for non-standard racks, and documentation that no one reads goes directly into the dumpster. Some of our more enlightened data centers encourage recycling, but no one seems to take the time to sort the mess. Add the extra fuel used to ship the servers as a result of this excess weight, and eliminating these extras would save us all money.
• Act like a global company: One of our server suppliers recently announced that they will no longer ship a server purchased in Canada directly to a US address. What this means for us is that when we order a server for one of our US data centers, the manufacturer ships it from the US factory to our Canadian office, where we turn around and ship it back.
• Offer us older hardware:  Newer isn’t always greener – or even necessary. In many cases, we can use older, lower power consuming CPUs to power our storage servers. We just can’t get them.

I am sure there a lots of things I have left off this list that may make more sense for your company. Think about them, and the next time your vendor’s rep asks if there is any way they can help you, you’ll have something to share with them.

A Legal Discovery Primer for IT - Key Definitions

Posted by Fortiva Blog Editor

As you may already know, an effective email archive can help your organization save a lot of time and effort if you ever face a legal discovery request. You need to ensure that your archiving solution is well equipped and allows you perform several functions with ease such as enforcing an email policy, searching and retrieving data, and placing litigation holds. Being able to place litigation holds is especially important so you can save yourself from receiving a guilty verdict due to spoliation.

At Fortiva, we often hear from IT professionals who are confused about the meanings or implications of legal discovery terms.  If that sounds like you, then this series of definitions with related case examples should help you to better understand your legal counsel or HR department the next time you face an eDiscovery request.

Legal Discovery
Basically, legal discovery is a part of the pre-trial phase in a lawsuit when the parties involved in litigation can request documents and other evidence from the opposing side.  The parties can compel the production of evidence by using a subpoena or other discovery devices such as request for production and disposition.  Essentially these discovery orders can target any source of data within an organization, be it electronically stored or on paper, but frequently the email system and file servers are at the top of the list. According to Socha Consulting LLC, for the average litigation case, email represents 80% of the requested documents.

FRCP
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) governs the conduct of all civil actions brought in the U.S. Federal district courts. Recent amendments made to the FRCP require all companies to retain all their corporate correspondence (including electronic online records) and make them available to the court in case of a lawsuit, without the court having to ask for them specifically.  These amendments were developed to make court proceedings more time-efficient. A brief description of the new amendments and its implications on electronic records retention and management can be found here.

ESI
The Sedona Conference defines ESI as electronically stored information, regardless of the media or whether it is in the original format in which it was created as opposed to stored in hard copy. With over 70% of business-critical information being stored in email and other electronic messaging resources, ESI has become an increasingly important source of evidence in lawsuits today.

eDiscovery
Electronic discovery is commonly referred to as eDiscovery and is defined as the process of identifying, collecting, preparing, and producing ESI for the purpose of obtaining evidence in a legal process. 

Litigation Hold
A litigation hold is a communication or process used by companies to advise their employees of pending or anticipated litigation and ensure that relevant records are not destroyed. Relevant records are documents that may pertain to the upcoming litigation and according to the FRCP, this includes email messages and attachments. Failure to preserve documents for a litigation hold can have very negative consequences during a trial (see spoliation below). A litigation hold may also be referred to as “legal hold”, “preservation order”, “suspension order”, “hold order”, “hold notice”, or “freeze notice”.

Spoliation
Spoliation is the destruction or significant alteration of evidence, or the failure to preserve property for use as evidence in pending or foreseeable litigation, audit, or government investigation. Spoliation is considered a criminal act, regardless of whether the records were destroyed intentionally or accidentally, and may result in fines or incarceration. It can also lead to a negative inference finding that can ultimately lead to a guilt verdict.

To effectively prepare for litigation, your organization must be familiar with the laws and regulations that impact your industry. Additionally, it is crucial for firms to have effective technologies in place so that they are able to respond to legal discovery requests and avoid spending a considerable amount of time and money in litigation. Later posts in this series will look at the above defined terms in more detail and provide actual case examples where a lengthy lawsuit could have been avoided had the firm implemented an effective email archiving solution.

Time to switch? Why more companies are making the move from in-house to SaaS email archiving

Posted by Praising Gaw, VP Marketing, Fortiva

It seems that every month we hear from more and more potential customers that are looking for an alternative to their in-house email archive. Generally, these companies complain about how much time it takes to manage their archive, and the headaches it involves. From constantly-growing hardware requirements to long search times and even re-indexing of data in some cases, there's no shortage of reasons why we're getting calls from unhappy IT people.   

Making it worse, the headaches keep increasing as the size of the archive inevitably grows over time. So it's not surprising that for many companies that implemented an archive 2,3, or 4 years ago, things are just now hitting a "breaking point" - and that's when they approach us. Consistently, those organizations that conduct a full cost comparison of their in-house  archive vs. Fortiva come to the same conclusion: someone else can look after their archiving better than they can, at a cheaper price, and without the headaches.

This week, we announced a customer who came to this conclusion after spending months trying to fix the issues with their in-house solution. National Financial Partners (NFP), a national network of independent financial advisors consisting of over 180 owned firms, did a detailed cost analysis and found it was going be 18-20 percent cheaper on an annual basis for them to implement Fortiva rather than continue maintaining their original archive. On top of that, they could offload the many archiving issues they had to Fortiva, leaving their IT team free to focus on other initiatives.

It's an interesting story, and one that is worth reading if you're struggling with the decision of whether to choose an in-house archive or a SaaS solution. The full case study can be found here.