Autonomy

CA's Acquisition of Orchestria May Fail to Answer Forthcoming SEC Compliance Concerns

2009-02-02T11:00:00Z

The recent announcement that CA acquired Orchestria to extend its identity and access management portfolio to include data loss prevention raises some key questions about exactly what problems CA hopes to solve. While DCIG sees the value in companies acquiring and merging with other companies to solve specific strategic problems, this one left us scratching our heads a bit. After all, wasn't it Bear Stearns who back in 2005 selected Orchestria to oversee its electronic communications? But now, in the light of day, really how much benefit did its implementation of Orchestria provide Bear Stearns in light of Bear Stearn's recent public failure?

So what benefits did Orchestria provide Bear Stearns? Well, we're pretty sure it was one of the products that that the SEC used to gather evidence against Bear Stearns when the SEC brought charges against two Bear Stearns Asset Management portfolio managers for fraudulently misleading investors about the state of the firm's two largest hedge funds. Interesting to note, the use of email communication is one of the primary means that is being used to prosecute these managers.

So if we for a moment forget about the stupidity of Bear Stearns' managers in leaving behind a trail of evidence for the SEC to find, it is also obvious that Orchestria's software suite really was not much help in preventing this from occurring in the first place. All it did was help investigators piece some of the puzzle back together after the damage was already done which, as we are finding out now, was too little, too late.

What is done is done but what DCIG sees as a problem with CA's acquisition of Orchestria and its product suite is that it does nothing to fill this gap of proactively helping organizations connect the dots before a situation like Bear Stearns escalates out of control. Sure, products like Orchestria protect information (which, in its defense, is all it claims to do) but with billions of dollars already lost by investors and the SEC coming after a company that is just a shell of its former self and no likelihood of ever recovering the money, what good is it?

But on a larger scale deficiencies like this are beginning to illustrate that organizations need to move beyond looking backward and adopt an entirely new model that identifies these activities before they escalate to the point where world markets are roiling because of them. It is DCIG's opinion that the government will be less satisfied going forward to come in after a debacle has already occurred. Instead, DCIG expects just the opposite. Businesses will be questioned incessantly about their internal operations, especially those that have recently received government funds.

There is already evidence of this based upon recent comments made by Mary Schapiro, the newly sworn in Chairman of the SEC. She recently said, "We will be committed to reinvigorating a financial regulatory system that must protect investors and vigorously enforce the rules. We will work to deepen the SEC's commitment to transparency, accountability, and disclosure while always keeping the needs and concerns of investors front and center." Translation: Schapiro is clearly warning that the SEC is very much focused on regulations and significantly increasing the number of enforcement actions.

Bear Sterns is just one case but other companies that are just now or have in the past implemented solutions in anticipation of these new regulations so they can appropriately react to inquiries may not be as well positioned as they first thought. This new proactive stance by the SEC may put a new twist on enforcement as the SEC looks to prevent incidents before they ever occur. What this may mean is that the SEC will expect organizations to connect the dots across all of their data repositories and proactively identify suspicious activities before it blows up.

What organizations should expect this initial scrutiny from the SEC? We think a good bet is the 200+ entities that have already received government money. While these institutions accepted the money in order to save themselves, it comes with a whole new level of scrutiny that could potentially result in them being dragged before Congress to explain where every piece of money went. After that, who knows? These changes could likely be pushed down the throats of other institutions and then if they can't comply or produce the required information, God help them.

While transparency and visibility into some of these organizations is probably needed, these are complex organizations. To gain access to all of an organization's available information and then take the right action to support litigation and compliance is already tough. But what is coming down the path introduces a whole new level of complexity that organizations need to prepare themselves for. Even in the case of Bear Sterns, all the information was probably there but nobody was available to put the whole story together until after the fact. In this new climate, regulators will want organizations to explain what they are doing and why they are doing it while they are doing it.

The level of transparency needed, and that is being suggested by the SEC, to safeguard government and taxpayer monies will now be rooted in understanding how all of an organization's information interrelates, regardless of where that information is coming from. This calls for an approach that pulls information from all of these repositories so organizations have a single, consistent view into their data across their environment.

As organizations move into this new environment, they are advised to look at solutions like Autonomy's IDOL platform. It brings together multiple forms of information by reaching into multiple data repositories and providing deep analytics so companies can extract relevant information and produce the explanations that help them explain what they are doing so they can meet regulator's requests. As companies start to look ahead, they will find that solutions that solved yesterday's problems are less relevant for the new challenges that they are about to face. It is only by obtaining an understanding of what content they have and where their risks and liabilities lie now that they can quickly build a strategy and respond to whatever new demands that this new regulatory environment presents.

Autonomy Remains Fully Committed to the Support and Development of EAS

2008-12-12T19:00:00Z

As analysts within the electronically stored information (ESI) space, DCIG pays close attention to not only features and benefits of specific products and solutions but also monitors other articles, blogs, and columns in the broader market place about specific vendors. In instances where allegations are made, it then tries to sort fact from fiction and present a more complete picture. Recently, some allegations about Autonomy have surfaced that sparked interest at DCIG as to their accuracy. To try to shed some light on the subject and move the conversation beyond hearsay to actual fact, DCIG contacted Autonomy about some statements that recently appeared online to clear the air for ourselves, as well as for our readers, at to what the recent changes at Autonomy mean for companies that currently rely upon or are looking to select Autonomy's archiving solutions.

One comment that appeared a few months ago on David Ferris's blog included the posting of an anonymous note that he had received about Autonomy's recent decision to close its office in Ottawa and move these employees to another location. It specifically questioned how this would affect the development efforts of Autonomy's ZANTAZ Enterprise Archiving Solutions (EAS) since it closed the office where EAS developers had previously resided. A comment on another site alleges that Autonomy has relegated EAS to strictly maintenance mode and has no further development planned. To us, it seems odd that Autonomy, whose strategic direction is to continue providing eDiscovery solutions, would decide to let this product languish as email archiving is a key component of their overall solution.

DCIG found out that these comments regarding the EAS developers do not paint a complete picture. Autonomy chose to shut down the Ottawa office, which contained only 15 or so EAS developers, for the purpose of co-locating EAS R&D with Autonomy's developers in Calgary, Alberta and Cambridge, England. According to Autonomy's Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Peter Menell, Autonomy expanded EAS development to 40 PhD engineers and co-located them with their core development organization to leverage the IDOL platform and eDiscovery applications with the EAS archive. This move of development and increase in head count has enabled Autonomy to become more aggressive in deeply merging IDOL development with the business functions that EAS serves.

By combining these development teams, Autonomy now has a dedicated group focused on archiving and eliminates the island of development that Ottawa had inadvertently become. Placing EAS, IDOL and content indexing developers next to each of these two areas has enabled Autonomy to better leverage their individual expertise across Autonomy's information infrastructure platform, IDOL, the IDOL KeyView connector set and audio and then combines them with all aspects of the new EAS product line.

In talking with Brian Weiss, Autonomy's VP of Products who was with Zantaz for five years before the Autonomy acquisition, he confirmed that the integration with EAS and IDOL is moving forward and fully complete in some areas. Already companies can do full content-based indexed searches using IDOL across EAS archives and, using IDOL's advanced analytics, can create content maps and establish patterns of communication that reach into the EAS archives. Broad areas of application for this integrated functionality include eDiscovery, records management applications, and supervision applications that go directly against the archive, though this last feature is most likely to be used primarily in banks.

The impetus in bringing these different platforms together was driven in part by feedback that Autonomy is receiving from its customer base and sales force out in the field. While the initial conversations between customers and their sales team often initially revolve around email archiving, they quickly broaden to discussions that encompass archiving and eDiscovery functions such as legal hold for a much broader range of ESI. These include audio (phone conversations), Bloomberg Message System, file servers, SharePoint and even video is starting to enter into the mix. To manage and archive data across this spectrum of data stores requires solutions that do more than just email archiving.

In examining Autonomy's Annual Reports from the past few years, Autonomy currently has one of the highest R&D spends in the software sector (which it also highlights regularly in its quarterly earnings call) plus over 500 people in R&D. But in order for Autonomy to continue to secure customer deals that range in value from $20M to $70M, EAS must remain a key component of its overall solution set. Therefore it makes no sense for them to abandon development or support of EAS as some have suggested. Rather, all indications are that it is fully committed to the development of this product.

To understand where Autonomy wants to do with its suite of products, it is important that followers of this space avoid taking a narrow view of Autonomy's true market play. DCIG views Autonomy as having the tools at its disposal so it can leverage its core competency to manage all types of unstructured data to help organizations archive and search across all types of corporate communications.

Autonomy views archiving as more than just email management or a means to an end. Instead, it takes the approach that while archiving is important, corporate data resides in multiple places in an organization and is equally important as email. Autonomy's investment in enterprise search technology is becoming a critical need with increased regulations and litigation which now spans across instant messaging, chat and audio. This holistic view of information enables companies and/or auditors to perform air-gap analysis so they can understand when and why communication channels are quickly changed by individuals, from email to phone for example, as a way of detecting possible fraud or insider trading.

DCIG thinks it safe to conclude that any comments to the effect that Autonomy intends to drop support or cease development on EAS are unfounded. Rather, DCIG holds the position that if Autonomy intends to continue to compete in the enterprise space, it needs to develop and support EAS to remain competitive.

Case in point, Autonomy's latest versions of Investigator and ECA analyze all types of ESI to swiftly ascertain whether there is a case before "meet and confers" occurs. This gives companies the flexibility to macro-evaluate a case based on understanding concepts, establishing links between audio recordings and emails, and automating the preservation of relevant data through linkage with Autonomy Legal Hold.

All companies shift gears or refocus from time to time and Autonomy is no exception. Autonomy's recent tactical changes and consolidation of offices appear part of its broader intent to bring EAS more in line with their overall product suite and accomplish more strategic objectives.

Changes to UK FSA Code of Business Conduct Brings Audio Recordings into the eDiscovery Mix

2008-11-25T11:00:00Z

Not too long ago, we can recall checking our voice messages and finding 30 to 50 messages in our respective inboxes every day. We would listen to them and then delete some or all of them, making notes along the way until we reached the end of the mailbox. While some of the messages were irrelevant, some were very important in that they conveyed corporate direction or pseudo-contractual agreements. Given that same scenario today in the financial industry, companies need to exercise extra caution as regulatory agencies and courts heighten requirements for companies to make documents of any type available, including audio recordings (telephone messages, voice mail, etc.).

To date companies have put audio aside because they lack a means to efficiently handle them and the SEC has been lax in its enforcement by not always requiring companies to produce "any type" of audio recordings as its own rules state. But that tide is changing, at least overseas, as new regulations are creeping into the UK that will require more visibility into this piece of electronically stored information (ESI).

The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA), given statutory powers by the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, in the Policy Statement 08/01: Financial Services Authority - Telephone Recording: recording of voice conversations and electronic communications, March 2008 - has published new rules that require the recording and retention of all telephone conversations and electronic communications.

The new rules go into effect in March 2009 and apply to all firms that receive client orders and negotiate, agree and arrange transactions across the equity, bond and financial commodity and derivatives markets. Some leniency in the original draft now excludes cell phones from being recorded and reduces the retention of audio from 3 years to 6 months in these circumstances. Equally important to note, the FSA can request tapes and records beyond the 6 month period if an investigation begins. Therefore, firms are advised to exercise diligence in destroying their old tapes and records in a timely manner.

While there is for now still a clear distinction between audio retention requirements in the UK and the US, companies in the US still need to be on their toes. Any time a US company calls, or is called by a company in the UK, the US company must be aware that they are being recorded by their counterpart in the UK. And this law does not just apply to UK-based companies. If a US-based company has an affiliate in the UK, then it is required to tape all conversations between the two. Initially this law will encompass all major US banks and, as we have seen before, once implemented in the financial institutions the private sector is next.

As these new regulations take effect in the UK, the US can expect two outcomes in the near term.

First, do not be surprised if the SEC follows the FSA's lead and more rigorously enforces the laws it already has in place by requiring companies to produce audio recording during routine audits. While not extensive, a simple search at www.ediscovery.com quickly shows a good handful of cases.
Second, expect other US legislative bodies and enforcement agencies to pass similar laws as the SEC's that require companies to produce audio recordings during eDiscovery process. This will force US companies to implement technologies such as Autonomy's IDOL platform that they can scale and deploy across their entire enterprise.

While the requirements to access, search and produce audio recordings is still in its early stages and not yet a prerequisite for most corporate eDiscoveries, the requirement to do so is moving closer, not further away. UK's new FSA law already puts a stake in the ground for English financial services firms and those in the US doing business with UK to comply by March 2009.

To meet these obligations, companies need to act now in order to put in place comprehensive solutions that go beyond existing textual electronic communications, keeping in mind that the shift in using Unified Messaging Systems (UMS), where messages will exist in any format, must be contended with. The challenge will be to capture audio regardless of recording technology, store the explosive volume of data and then provide intelligent searching to produce relevant information found in the recordings in a timely manner.

Autonomy Takes Audio eDiscovery off of the Corporate Backburner

2008-11-14T19:00:00Z

Within the Enforcement Manual of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Division of Enforcement, there exists a definition of the document types for which an officer might deem relevant and issue a subpoena. Though the definition reads "...messages of any type, telephone messages, voice mails...or otherwise, which can be retrieved, obtained, manipulated, or translated", most companies focus on the "messages of any type" component of that definition. When they do, they put audio recordings such as phone and voice messages on the backburner as there is no efficient way to handle them. But having to deal with audio content from phone systems, VoIP, call desks, trading desks, etc., is entering the mainstream of eDiscovery.

The need to pull audio into the eDiscovery process is gaining attention because of scenarios that appear innocuous on the surface. Consider situations where someone like a trader is having a phone conversation with a client and at the same moment exchanging emails with another. On the surface, the two tasks seem distinct and unrelated with no indication of foul play. But if one listens to the audio in context with the email exchange, it may paint a completely different picture. In fact, it may show that the trader was in fact working the client on the phone call to his advantage based on information he was receiving from the individual with whom he was exchanging emails or instant messages.

However tying these two events together is anything but easy doing only a discovery of written messages. Companies are now challenged to efficiently bring audio eDiscoveries into their larger eDiscovery processes of written content such as emails and instant messages. In these circumstances audio eDiscovery is almost always handled as a separate process but this inability to combine audio and email eDiscoveries into one has created the following challenges for companies:

The need to bring in point products for each type of eDiscovery
The need to hire high-paid consultants to manage audio eDiscoveries
Creating and maintaining one-off processes to handle audio

This lack of an integrated process results in companies adopting audio discovery processes that are separate from the normal chain of custody processes. This results in email and audio data not tagged the same way and no way to directly relate them to each other. Further, the context of building a timeline when these transactions occurred becomes more difficult to create and leaves investigators unable to see the interrelationships between these different messages. This is problematic from a legal standpoint as companies move to a uniform communications model since all communications in whatever form they take - written, audio and eventually video - must be put into context.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter from where communications originate. What matters now is how companies produce what is relevant. Companies like Autonomy realize this fact and provide eDiscovery tools that bring email and audio technologies together for eDiscovery. With investigative tools and graphical models, companies can quickly sort through massive amounts of data and construct simple, intuitive timelines that answer questions about what happened, when it happened and in what context. As companies start to close this gap, companies obtain an understanding of what content they have and where the risks and liabilities lie and then use them to quickly build a strategy and bring those items into play so they go into any litigation scenario in the best position possible.

Chasing Holistic eDiscovery Solutions; Interview with Autonomy e-Discovery Director Jack Halprin Part 3

2008-09-25T18:00:00Z

In Part 1 & Part 2 of our interview with Jack, we learned about his first impressions of the Autonomy products anchored by the IDOL Platform and specifically how the Aungate Investigator & Early Case Assessment (ECA) and Aungate Legal Hold products address common gaps in identification and preservation stages of litigation.

G: The products that you cover focus on the early litigation stages; Identification, Preservation & Collection. These are the stages that corporate legal is clearly responsible for at least overseeing. What is Autonomy's vision for corporations and how does that differentiate from competing products?

J: Autonomy's goal is to be the eDiscovery partner of choice for our customers, and our Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) brings a unique end to end technology platform to the corporation that can manage the entire eDiscovery and information/records management lifecycle. Too many people think that point products are actual solutions; the reality is that email archives, search engines or workflow tracking applications are pitched as an e-Discovery solution while only addressing one piece of the puzzle. Autonomy's vision is to touch the ESI once to enable search, identification, preservation, policy enforcement, and other related actions, including disposition, from this core platform. With the IDOL platform, there is no need to re-index or re-process the ESI, mitigating the risk of spoliation, and there is no need to create even more copies that have to be stored and managed.

One of the major issues that plague the point products, such as email archiving solutions or legal hold notification platforms, is their limited scope of targets and data streams. We see the corporate infrastructure as a whole, not just as an Exchange server or end-user laptops. IDOL is ready for Unified Messaging and all the different data streams that come along with it. Autonomy's IDOL platform connects to over 400 different environments, including other vendor email archives and laptops, and supports over a 1000 different content formats so that it is able to understand the meaning of those files and make the contents searchable.

G: So let's talk about search. What does Autonomy's Meaning Based Computing really mean to discovery and legal teams?

J: The IDOL platform enables Meaning Based Computing and takes overlapping search functionality like keywords, metadata, phonetics and conceptual search to build meaning out of their contextual relationships. To put it simply, IDOL uses these contextual viewpoints to better understand the meaning of the items and to know how the rest of your data is related to it. Additionally, unlike many solutions available today, IDOL is language independent and can currently process more than 130 different languages.

I saw an impressive automatic learning example while visiting a Pharmaceutical client. They used the IDOL platform to distinguish and track documents and communications based on drug names, dosages, and abbreviations within contextual conversations to automatically categorize items relating to different trials and field reports. This allows them to connect email, reports on file shares and voicemail. I am seeing similar usage of our speech analytics product in call centers and trading floors. The constantly evolving slang and vocabulary of brokers on a trade floor quickly render a manual filter system ineffective. IDOL is able to keep up with changes to common verbiage and extract meaning automatically.

G: Since we are wrapping up, go ahead and see if you can give us the key Autonomy difference.

J: It all comes down to a vision of an underlying technology platform that dramatically changes the way in which we interact with information and computers: where computers adapt to our world rather than the other way around. Because we use a Meaning Based Computing platform, our technology enables people to interact with information ideas and understand their relationships to each other, no matter how they are expressed and no matter what the format. Based on that understanding, Autonomy's solutions process information and perform sophisticated analysis operations that provide a tremendous advantage in overcoming the challenges of managing electronic data for eDiscovery, information & records management, and compliance. Corporations want a single platform and a single vendor to rely on to minimize the footprint in the organization and to build a partnership with, they do not want to run a hundred searches with a hundred different platforms, even though they may have more than a hundred different varieties of ESI.

Chasing Holistic Enterprise Solutions; Interview with Autonomy e-Discovery Director Jack Halprin Part 2

2008-09-22T20:07:18Z

In Part 1, we talked with Jack Halprin about transitioning from a forensic collection product and market to Autonomy's enterprise solutions. Now we get to learn more about the specific products that he is working with and how they address customer's pain points in the early stages of the e-Discovery lifecycle.

G: So tell me a bit about Aungate Legal Hold and what makes it different from other legal hold applications.

J: .Aungate Legal Hold is the only legal hold solution in the market that combines notification and interviews with preservation and collection. Most legal hold solutions offer minimal help in meeting the preservation obligation, as they are little more than workflow tools to help the corporation send, track, and manage notifications and interviews. The courts have been clear that merely sending a hold notification to a custodian just does not suffice to meet the duty to preserve potentially relevant corporate data. This is further compounded by legal hold solutions that only offer the option of a custodian self collection, as the courts have also found this insufficient; custodians typically do not know where all the potential ESI resides or even how to properly preserve it. Corporate IT infrastructure and data systems are just too complex to assume that an average user will preserve potentially relevant ESI without some assistance. Greg, it is important to keep in mind that case after case has reminded us that the corporation must take affirmative steps beyond a hold notice to preserve potentially relevant ESI.

G: So Aungate Legal Hold enables more than just notification and tracking?

J: Absolutely. We built Aungate Legal Hold to offer a comprehensive legal hold solution to handle everything from notification and custodian management through preservation and collection. Autonomy's IDOL platform enables the legal department to automatically locate, preserve and collect from every data source without requiring custodian intervention. Everything on a custodian's local and network storage can be indexed, analyzed, and preserved, either proactively or reactively as needed; this includes the ability to analyze voice data, such as voicemails in from a unified messaging system. Aungate Legal Hold can preserve in place or collect a forensically sound copy into the central repository, depending upon the status of the matter and the corporate policy; its ability to preserve data in place on laptops and desktops is an industry first. The system can actively monitor new files and email to act upon them according to the hold policies. This overall approach enables Legal to see the ESI in place and apply appropriate actions, in an effort to minimize risk. Additionally, Aungate Investigator & ECA works seamlessly to allow the legal team to perform early case assessment, determine whether there is a case, and prepare for the pre-trial and discovery planning conferences.

G: So this active monitoring on the desktop sounds a lot like antivirus. What is the difference?

J: Antivirus products have to scan and react almost instantly across live applications and storage. In comparison, the IDOL desktop agent is more of a data management service running in the background than an endpoint security or active Data Loss Prevention (DLP) application.

The Aungate policy agent works with IDOL to effect the legal hold, monitor for new items that match the policy, and then act as needed. All of these services and applications function iteratively to protect, collect, archive, delete, alert and analyze data automatically, even if a user machine is not online. This takes the burden off of the user and empowers corporate Legal to do more than issue instructions.

G: I agree with you that hold notices by themselves are not sufficient, but diligent companies also conduct training, interviews and have collection teams to assist and monitor hold compliance. Is it possible for a company to preserve ESI without an enterprise platform?

J: Possible, yes, but time consuming and potentially costly. Think about how much effort a large corporation has to go to in a typical case covering a single business unit over several years of historical and ongoing ESI; now, imagine that the case covers multiple business units, multiple locations, and disparate systems. Can the organization really take the risk that an employee will inadvertently or deliberately destroy relevant data? In the recent Hawaiian Airlines case (In re Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., 2007 WL 3172642 (Bkrtcy. D.Hawaii October 30, 2007)), the attorneys sat down with the CFO of Mesa Air Group and he assured them that he would preserve all his email and files. The CFO responded to the hold by returning to his computer and wiping relevant data. The parent company claimed that they were not liable for individual actions, but the court disagreed and found against them, saying that the duty is to preserve the data and not merely issue a hold notice and expect an employee will comply. Think of the cost and effort associated with a manual process and weigh that against the risk that one employee's actions can still result in public sanctions.

Chasing Holistic eDiscovery Solutions; Interview with Autonomy eDiscovery Director Jack Halprin Part 1

2008-09-04T14:45:48Z

This blog entry is the first in a series of interviews with Autonomy's new Director of eDiscovery, Jack Halprin. Jack is well known in the eDiscovery world having held a lead role on the EDRM Metrics Project and for his work at Guidance Software.

In this first interview, Jack gets to talk about what drew him to Autonomy and his first impressions coming on-board. Autonomy's breadth and diversity of offerings can be intimidating from a consumer's viewpoint, so we get an expert's inside view of what makes them different.

Greg: So first and foremost, tell us about your new role at Autonomy.

J: I am one of two Directors of eDiscovery at Autonomy, focusing on the early stages of the eDiscovery lifecycle, specifically the Information Management, Identification, Preservation and Collection phases. I work as an industry evangelist speaking at conferences and working with customers on how to apply advanced technology and best practices.

Greg: So what products do you concentrate on in these earlier eDiscovery stages?

Jack: I cover our Aungate Legal Hold and Aungate Investigator Early Case Assessment (ECA) products. At the core of each product is Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) platform, offering an index of all data types to assist organizations with FRCP compliance. IDOL goes far beyond typical text based indexing and legacy keyword search, with advanced conceptual and analytic search capabilities and enables all of our products to analyze and act from a single index. It is the foundation of the entire Autonomy product line and enables a seamless integration of all applications throughout the eDiscovery and information management lifecycle without having to constantly move or reprocess the data.

Greg: We can go in depth on the products a bit later. You've talked to quite a few organizations over the years about eDiscovery and must have heard numerous perspectives. Tell us about the contrasts and similarities.

Jack: In talking with corporations I found three main viewpoints. Some organizations are still completely reactive. They manually pull email or other ESI on request, but had no systems in place to truly manage ESI. The next thought that email was everything. They had invested in collection or archiving products to address their Exchange or Domino environment and assumed that would protect them for eDiscovery purposes while pretty much ignoring the rest of their ESI. The more progressive corporations understand that email is a big part of the problem but there are many other data sources that must be managed. These corporations want to be ready for every eDiscovery challenge with a unified system, and they were the ones saying, "Tell me about the other ways we can tackle this."

Autonomy is enterprise founded with products in every conceivable step along the eDiscovery lifecycle, from information management through to production and presentation. I am really enjoying the shift in focus in that Autonomy's infrastructure covers every data source, not just email or desktops and laptops. One of the things that I was looking for was a system truly capable of handling the challenges of unified messaging, SharePoint, and all the different data streams we see now, with the ability to grow and meet any challenge we could see in the future.

Greg: What else impressed you with Autonomy?

Jack: One of the things that struck me came during my first demo on Autonomy's products. Forensic software is written by techs for techs, and it can be very intimidating and complex to a corporate attorney or even an IT analyst used to working with enterprise applications. I was impressed with the usability of Autonomy's search and how intuitive it is for non-technical end users. The integration of keywords, natural language, conceptual search and more into our Meaning Based Computing platform, IDOL, is worlds apart from the keyword based GREP syntax of a forensic based software product.

The Challenge of Historical Corporate Collections, Leveraging Legal Demands - Part 2 of 2

2008-08-06T14:21:43Z

In my last blog we talked about how legal and regulatory demands could be leveraged to provide a mandate and funding to acquire broader enterprise search, collection, archiving and compliance systems. Now we will walk through some of the systems and how they can be applied to address eDiscovery requests to justify their deployment. In these challenging economic times, budgets are tighter than ever, but if you understand how much even a small discovery event can cost, enterprise wide applications make a lot of sense.

Enterprise Search - Most corporate file servers have literally decades of accumulated unstructured Electronically Stored Information hidden in directories that no one understands or owns. Tackling this sea of data can cost more than the potential liability of the matter. Inside counsel have traditionally dealt with this by collecting and searching only directories actively associated with named custodians and praying that they have not missed anything vital. To give them credit, the likelihood of critical, relevant information being found in the non-custodial directories is generally low. But some cases do not have clearly defined custodians and can span the lifetime of the corporation. Indexing the enterprise enables counsel to search some of their content sources. Best of all, it arms inside counsel with the ability to actively run test searches to make reasonableness arguments in meet and confer sessions. It is important to assess a search engines scope and know what types and locations that it covers. Few search engines cover voice, video and other non-standard content like Autonomy's IDOL platform. Inside counsel would also benefit from conceptual analysis on profile core data sets to validate search criteria. These search platforms add overhead and do not come cheap, but a single shareholder suit could justify the expense, especially if your corporate insurer is willing take a longer view.

Archiving Platforms - Enterprise archiving platforms can provide the greatest initial ROI for defensible collection and preservation of the messaging environment. Archives are not a solution unto themselves, but they can be a good start. Legal needs a way to immediately preserve all email associated with a business unit while they assess potential risk around a possible litigation. IT could just keep the nightly incremental back up tapes, but that would still miss any email delivered and deleted the same day. Putting the custodians on notice gets a measure of defensibility, but how do you check to make sure that your users are complying when the case could go on for months or years? IT could enable Exchange Journaling to catch all traffic, but then they have to save the accumulating email somewhere off of Exchange before they break the bank. An archive provides an immediate repository with the ability to search and apply legal holds on the message stream. Archives are just expanding to file shares and other content, so you should carefully evaluate their collection and search mechanisms before relying on them for legal preservation.

Endpoint Security/Real Time Policy - Although these file control systems are relatively new, they have a great deal of potential beyond the obvious data leakage prevention and corporate computer usage enforcement. One of the biggest issues with the traditional legal hold notification methods is actually enforcing rules on users. These systems use a servlet or root level service to apply content level filters and actions even when users are disconnected with the network. Imagine being able to tell the Judge that you pushed out a preservation policy when first notified of the matter that ensured that users could not delete, copy or otherwise spoil evidence that matched the rules? Now imagine IT being able to actually get rid of all the MP3 and AVI files on the network without manual sweeps.

There are many more enterprise applications that can be dual purposed for eDiscovery and business benefits. Desktop search can help users find and designate ESI. Firewall and spam systems can actually be used to collect IM conversations. Content Management Systems expand the potential search/preservation criteria and can decrease the potential volume of ESI by enabling active expiry of unnecessary items. The important thing is to think beyond point solutions and bring legal, business and IT to the table to extract the greatest value from the 'cost of doing business' in America.

The Challenge of Historical Corporate Collections, Leveraging Legal Demands - Part 1 of 2

2008-07-16T19:56:12Z

As corporations slowly face the consequences of unmanaged information assets, they have started to form ESI retention policies, acquire email archives and other enterprise technologies needed to track and dispose of newly created communications. It is much simpler to enable policy, process and technology to handle the go forward content than to deal with years or decades of accumulated unstructured content. Most public corporations have existing preservation requirements to deal with on top of possible long term retention regulations.

The combination of the 2000-2002 public corporate scandals and heavy sanctions like the Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, et al., S.D.N.Y 02 CV 1234 (SAS) 7/20/04; 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS (S.D.N.Y, July 20, 2004) case resulted in panicked phone calls from Legal to IT asking, "Are we keeping everything?"We know that IT was not keeping EVERYTHING before, but suddenly tape backup systems were repurposed from one month disaster recovery systems to impromptu preservation systems. Even if the company has faced those growing stockpiles of tape and conquered that mountain, the revised FRCP are so new that most General Counsels have been reluctant to approve of the resumption of destruction policies without a full assessment and revision of existing paper-based policies.

This leaves many companies, municipalities and other entities struggling with whether to tackle their historical collections before or after putting new systems and policies in place. If they are not careful, it can paralyze their new retention initiative and leave them at even greater risk for increased cost and even sanctions. It is important to remember that the judiciary is always more critical of your current efforts to satisfy your retention and production obligations as compared to your historical 'gaps'. In this light, we can see that the first priority is to put the process, technology and people in place to prevent ongoing data loss and control the costs as the company moves forward. You cannot change the past, but you can change your capabilities to meet current and future challenges.

Does that mean that you just ignore all the old ESI? Do you just ignore the terabytes of 'Litigation Landmines' (PST files) living on local and network drives until a litigation request demands them? That is actually a business cost versus risk decision that every entity above a certain size must make in light of their regulatory or litigation profile. It is definitely not 'best practice' to leave all that unstructured content out there, but the current business environment does not always allow us the luxury of true 'best practice' solutions without a clear short term ROI justification.

One method of attack is to leverage high priority litigation and regulatory events to fund and implement enterprise systems such as search, categorization, real time policy enforcement, archiving, continuous data protection and desktop backup. All of these technologies are a part of an overall discovery solution, but have immediate business applications that can justify their cost. The key to getting budget is the open communication and coordination between legal and IT. Instead of spending millions on service providers to respond to a single case, legal should bring IT, the business director and the insurance adjustor to the table to talk over in-house systems. As an example, a shareholder lawsuit might require such broad preservation and collection to justify conversion and ingestion of old tapes into an archive where they can be searched, categorized and even disposed of properly. Legal is a corporate cost center, but it is time to acknowledge that litigation is a fact of life in corporate America and quit spending like it is a one time event.

Exploring the Secondary ROI of Discovery Purchases - DLP, Archiving, Endpoint Security

2008-07-08T15:03:48Z

In looking back at the earliest generations of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Business Analytics and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) products, we can see a wasteland of interesting technology that was too early for the market. We are now seeing the hints of resurgence in products adjacent to enterprise discovery based on the 'secondary benefits' of corporate archiving, preservation and collection. Basically, corporations seem to be recognizing that the infrastructure required to establish an efficient, defensible discovery process can and should be leveraged to provide other business functionality.

In recent blogs, I have talked about how these early enterprise analytic products have tried to transform themselves into eDiscovery 'solutions' with mixed results. It is sometimes the secondary analytical features of these products that can provide an unexpected ROI far beyond the discovery compliance driver that got the budget out of legal. Although opposing counsel and many courts are not yet ready to rely exclusively on conceptual search and other 'black box' (i.e. not easily understood) technologies to winnow the wheat from the ESI chaff, these systems can dramatically reduce the cost of review and provide essential QA for Boolean criteria.

More relevant to IT, HR and Compliance needs, enterprise systems can be leveraged to shape data management policies, enforce computer/messaging usage policies and monitor a growing concern, Data Loss Prevention (DLP). These peripheral usage scenarios have not been a big enough pain point to drive widespread adoptions and budget allocation outside of tightly regulated verticals, but they are happy to make use of the new enterprise applications and appliances funded by legal.

In fact, the fastest ROI on search or archiving platforms frequently comes from resolving potential litigation through Early Case Assessment searches. I recall answering a simple request from a new director regarding the communications over a multi-million dollar contract by the former director. The company had just finished loading all the old email from tapes into an archive to comply with a discovery request, so we had everything possible online. The savings from finding that one email clearly expressing the mutual understanding of a term saved the company twice the price of the archive system. Instant ROI that had nothing to do with the original purpose of the system.

The biggest potential benefit of conceptual filters and categorization engines is to shift the corporation's capability to a proactive stance, rather than a reactive response. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is all about preventing critical trade secrets and confidential information from reaching the wrong eyes. The same technology that helps review teams catch potentially privileged email before they are produced can be used to stop your pricing lists and source code from leaving the domain. With the widest ESI type capability, it is not surprising to hear that Autonomy's IDOL platform is used by a majority of the DLP market leaders. The focus is on the messaging systems, but endpoint control and enterprise encryption are also starting to make sales, again driven by the complexity of collecting and preserving ESI from user desktops. So when legal is fighting for budget to address a discovery gap, it is critical to involve the other departments who have a vested interest in gaining these new capabilities and slowly moving the corporation towards the goal of true information management.

The Roots of Search Engines - Why you should care what is behind your enterprise Search

2008-06-26T13:50:01Z

Enterprise level discovery requires enterprise level technology or by definition it becomes 'unduly burdensome' for any but the smallest cases. Recent opinions from federal judges and appellate courts on both coasts have made it clear that the discovery process, technology and personnel are under increasing scrutiny. Plaintiff's counsel are reading the same opinions from Judge John Facciola (United States v. O'Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14 (D.D.C. 2008)) and the 9^th Circuit (Quon v. Arch Wireless). Many will interpret them as a signal to initiate Daubert style hearings to force corporations to defend their search engines, communication systems and the discovery effort in response to discovery demands.

Corporate counsel may then turn to the vendor that sold them an 'enterprise solution' and demand an expert to defend the search engine. Some of the vendors have made the serious investment to validate their technology through 3^rd party testing or by recruiting resident experts. The reality of our industry is that there have been few if any public challenges to the accuracy and completeness of software sold to the eDiscovery market. Until recently, most of this software was purchased and run by service providers who had an interest in defending the product that they proposed and operated behind the magic curtains.

The majority of applications now focused on the corporate eDiscovery spend were originally created for information management, knowledge management, process analytics, storage management, disaster recovery and other non-litigation business needs. Enterprise search engines were mostly born from the research into scaling internet search engines that started back in the early 1990's. The problem with web based search is that the systems are optimized for speed and relevance, rather than completeness. A recent Autonomy release drew attention to the engine 'jump out' issue, where some systems actually stop or skip indexes when they think it unlikely to find a match.

Not all applications that use search engines created for the internet are unsuitable for discovery search. The index engine 'schema' or configuration controls how it crawls through files to extract out the information needed to get search results as well as how it behaves while running a search. Many enterprise applications like email archives and document management systems utilize open source or OEM'd index engines like FAST, IDOL and Lucene. Most of these index engines are dependent upon outside software to recognize divergent types of ESI and extract the text in discrete words (a process called tokenization) with a few exceptions like Autonomy's IDOL platform. The configuration and options in a system can result in dropping out critical ESI from the index/search or it can bring the system to its knees by forcing it to try to index file types which contain no text or character sets that it cannot handle.

The critical take away from these new cases is that you need to know the capabilities and limitations of your chosen search engine(s). Not just what the software provider tells you it can do, but actually how it performs on your ESI. Think about standing before a court and answering the question, "How do you know that your search got everything that matched your criteria?" Judges are not seeking some impossible level of absolute certainty, but they expect to hear about your reasonable effort to validate your tools.

"All keyword searches are not created equal"

2008-06-17T02:41:36Z

A recent federal civil case, Stanley v. Creative Pipe (F.Supp.2d ----, 2008 WL 2221841 (D. Md.)) has raised interesting questions about the standard of reasonableness when using keyword searches to select or exclude ESI from a large collection. The fact pattern is a long tangled story about using searches to segregate privileged ESI and boils down to the waiver of privilege of 165 contested documents that were produced because they did not get hits from the search engine used by a computer forensic expert.

The legal ramifications of the case are better left to attorney interpretation, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm made several interesting statements that give insight into how the increasingly sophisticated judiciary is raising the bar on search. The first leads in with, "there is a growing body of literature that highlights the risks associated with conducting an unreliable or inadequate keyword search or relying exclusively on such searches for privilege review."

So the bedrock of retrieval, the venerated keyword search, does not stand all on its own. In this case, the seventy-odd search terms were neither disclosed to, nor agreed upon by the opposing party. The terms were created by counsel and client, then executed by their hired gun. All the items that could not be indexed were manually reviewed for privilege, but it appears that no one reviewed the 'searchable' items that did not contain the list of search terms before being produced.

Judge Grimm continues, "Common sense suggests that even a properly designed and executed keyword search may prove to be over-inclusive or under-inclusive, resulting in the identification of documents as privileged which are not, and non-privileged which, in fact, are. The only prudent way to test the reliability of the keyword search is to perform some appropriate sampling of the documents determined to be privileged and those determined not to be in order to arrive at a comfort level that the categories are neither over-inclusive nor under-inclusive."

Upon receiving the production, the opposing party used a "readily-available desktop search tool." to find some of the formerly privileged items. It is unfortunate that the order does not specify the technology used by each side, but it is clear that quite a bit of effort was expended to manually wade through PDF and TIFF files that could have been searched with the right tools. Even hiring a 'computer forensic expert' did not save the Defendants' from their own decisions.

Keywords are easy to understand and even easier to misuse. Beyond the science of 'precision and recall' there needs to be process, communication and metrics to reach the standard of reasonable due diligence, this 'comfort level' that Judge Grimm cites. The process needs to identify the known exceptions to your chosen technology. Have you asked or tested for the ability to search across different formats of email, files, databases, images, voice, video and languages? Do you even know the composition of your ESI collection and how that will affect any searches?

Are all search results equal?

2008-06-04T18:47:14Z

Ever since George Socha and other analysts called out the raw size of the eDiscovery market and the rapid growth of technology sales driven by corporations efforts to become compliant with the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), software developers with dollar signs in their eyes have adapted existing products for the eDiscovery market. The problem is that many or most of them have no real understanding of the unique requirements and challenges of legal search. The Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Knowledge Management (KM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) movements have left the market littered with interesting applications that the corporate market was not yet ready to pay for. Many of these products are now showing up dressed in an eDiscovery GUI and being sold as eDiscovery solutions without even rudimentary testing on the myriad types of corporate ESI.

Just because a system is marketed for use in eDiscovery does not relieve the service provider or corporate legal department from the responsibility to conduct fundamental validation testing of the systems basic functions. Too many customers believe that the software company somehow warrants or guarantees the accuracy of search results, just because it was sold specifically for legal search. The entire industry has suffered from a bit of willful blindness for several years now. Blaming inaccurate results on the software or appliance will not get you much pity from the judiciary when you fail to produce large portions of custodians communications because of the myriad ways that Microsoft Exchange can retain addresses.

At the recent Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) 2008-2009 project kickoff conference, I was pleased to participate in the formation of a new group focused on legal search. The primary goal of this group is to explore how to document, audit and defend the search process used. The recent Sedona Conference commentaries for Working Group 1 have also called out the need to validate search, culling, review and all other methods that comprise your discovery response process. This is exciting stuff and not just for us techno-junkies.

Even when search engines perform exactly as designed, counsel and their technical support need to understand how the systems handle their unique blend of corporate ESI. The configurations of enterprise messaging and file systems change over time and that actually changes the characteristics and metadata available to search engines. Consider the major changes in how message envelopes are formatted between Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007. Now consider the fact the most corporate major upgrades are spread over quarters and you realize that almost every large enterprise environment has multiple systems that are running in a mixed mode (i.e. more than one version of the system running simultaneously).

All of this does not mean that it is impossible to conduct a reasonable, defensible search, preservation or collection. Instead it points out the need to understand your environment and to document the efforts made to test and analyze the capabilities and exceptions of potential eDiscovery technology before putting them to use. With more innovative CIO's looking to implement enterprise search and analytics, it is critical that the legal department collaborates on the system requirements and testing process.

This concept of test before you trust applies to service providers as well as applications. The Autonomy Book on Compliance, Risk, Legal and Regulatory Technologies gives excellent basic guidelines for key testing considerations in a Proof of Concept scenario. They expand on these basic concepts in a full whitepaper titled, "A Guide to a Successful PoC: The Dos and Don'ts for Selecting Unstructured Data Management Software." We need more awareness of the pitfalls around implementation and adoption of untested technology and process. Do not let your faith in your existing system keep you from giving it a pop quiz.

Concept Search, where does it fit in discovery?

2008-05-23T22:45:21Z

This is a common question from large corporations when they are evaluating enterprise systems for search, preservation and collection. The answer is not simple or definitive. First let us look at what conceptual clustering is and what it can and cannot do for us. Conceptual engines use a variety of methods to group common sets of words, phrases and even properties to create associated lists of concepts, topics, facets and even more names than can be relayed here. They all have a different secret sauce for ranking and grouping these related words and properties to extract analytical relationships between the vast numbers of items in the typical collection.

A conceptual engine essentially lets the ESI talk for itself. Rather than a person creating a search from their preconceptions of what criteria will retrieve all items related to a given request, the systems analyze and present the items back as folders, dot clusters and other visual diagrams to help the user make sense of the complex relationships. All of this sounds like just what the attorney asked for. "Give me everything relating to this deal."

But what one should consider is that concepts are just groups of words or phrases that express similar ideas. They do not directly answer the typical request for production demanding 'any and all documents or communications that constitute, contain, embody, comprise, reflect, identify, state, refer to, deal with, comment on, respond to, describe, involve, mention, discus, record, support or are in any way pertinent to' the topic at hand. That means that you cannot just plug in the text of the demand into a conceptual search and expect that you will retrieve everything required.

To make matters even more complicated, the secret sauce of conceptual engines is a lot like black magic to those who do not spend all of their time figuring out how to build a better search engine, meaning most of us. Trying to explain to the court how such an engine determined that all these documents were related and why the cluster was named that way can challenge the bravest of testifying experts and drown the veracity of your efforts in a sea of technical fog.

"So what good are concepts if I cannot search on them?", asks counsel. No one doubts the worth of conceptual analysis to find the key items produced by the opposing party, but how does that help the corporation find all their relevant email? The first step of incident response in the EDRM model is the Identification phase. The traditional approach is to interview the primary custodians associated with the matter and try to generate the preservation instructions. When dealing with enterprise archives like Autonomy's EAS, that means coming up with search criteria to place your legal holds. How do you know what criteria are related to the matter? Up to this point, counsel inside and out have been doing their best to define the criteria, but few have leverage a defensible, explainable process to support their criteria.

Maybe you have already collected the initial, key ESI that the custodians thought relevant to the matter. Or you have run a search using the truly unique terms, names and dates to perform your risk assessment. If you have a collection that you know is relevant, conceptual search engines like Autonomy's IDOL can show you the concepts within your collection to define or expand your actual hard Boolean search criteria. Now you can demonstrate the tools used to verify your due diligence and catch the variations and jargon used to talk about your topic.

So I do not feel that counsel and the courts are ready to rely on conceptual search as the sole means to retrieve ESI, but they can enable, defend and control the cost of corporate preservation and collection efforts when used in a structured process. In the end, it is not concept vs. keyword. Instead the products and solutions that integrate them will provide the most bang for the buck.

So what about the voicemail?

2008-05-15T00:42:34Z

The dreaded question plagues discovery vendors, IT and even industry experts shy away from tackling the costs and complexities created by emerging unified communications systems. Office Communications Server 2007 and other communication systems feed divergent media streams into enterprise archives, corporate legal hold repositories and litigation collections. This 'simplification' for the users actually poses serious challenges for search technologies that have traditionally focused exclusively on text.

Finding key terms and phrases buried inside of mountains of recorded phone conversations, voice mails and IM chats can devour discovery budgets and send counsel crying 'undue burden' to the court. There seem to be two dominant speech analytics methods: phonetic indexing (first brought to eDiscovery by Nexidia) and transcription or speech-to-text (long dominated by Autonomy's engine which supports both methods). Phonetic search renders sound wave forms into simplified strings of phonemes that can be indexed and searched. This makes the technology effectively content agnostic, but makes it challenging to integrate with text based search. Speech-to-text has been the foundation for automated conceptual search and improvements in speaker recognition technologies have also increased the value in what was effectively raw dialogue.

Knowing that one can search digitized conversations, the next question is can users effectively search everything within the enterprise system from unified federated search? There is little doubt that the archiving systems are aggressively pursuing acquisitions, partnerships and development to enable ingestion and indexing of every conceivable data stream. All of them started with email back in the late 1990's. For example, Symantec doesn't have audio, but jumped ahead with early products to handle IM, file shares, Sharepoint through merger and acquisition.

Mergers inject complexity by requiring integration of technology, services and cultures. Having experienced the Symantec-Veritas integration first hand, it always surprises me to see pundits and bloggers jumping all over the expected personnel departures. Moreover, other restructurings that occur in the wake of big M&A moves. Instead of looking at who departed, which products are End-of-Lifed and which partners jump ship, I think that we should look at who stays, fundamental IP integrations and new solution offerings to get a better idea of where the new joint entity is headed.

As a former customer of Zantaz's Introspect, I watched press releases closely after the Autonomy acquisition last July. I was surprised to see how quickly all of Zantaz's products were integrated to the IDOL search architecture. A two to three month integration tells me that the business units got the resources and investment needed to make necessary changes under the hood. The back channel continues to be positive. For example, after speaking with two big Introspect customers at a conference last week, it was clear that Autonomy had greatly improved search speed and performance. The back end administration and database complexity still seems to be an issue with some customers, but systems that offer enterprise scale will require enterprise level investments in architecture, support and consistent project management to succeed. Perhaps that is at the root of the shift within the Zantaz channel to go up market and target larger sales?

If we are going to demand that large public corporations make all of their communication data streams accessible and manageable to respond to the new FRCP requirements, then we have to expect further consolidation in the maze of different applications used today. Discovery, ILM, Retention Management, Enterprise Content Management and all the other flavors of alphabet soup are just ways of saying that companies are responsible for administrating their information assets, including formerly transient forms such as audio, IM, PIN-2-PIN, etc.

There's a new sheriff in Information Governance and she goes by Autonomy

2008-04-14T15:30:00Z

Since 2000 the requirements for broad based archiving of unstructured content have been on the rise. The creation of the majority of unstructured content was widely done in electronic mail; or so we have assumed. However, file attachments have become prolific in the last ten years increasing in both size and quantity within electronic mail. These files must be created by someone and stored somewhere.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that these file attachments are stored locally and on file servers. The files are outside the reach of traditional enterprise content management (ECM) and record management business processes. The files are a product of non-deliberate business processes. Non-deliberate processes, as I described in a previous blog with DCIGInc.com, are difficult to manage because they involve certain levels of creativity that fluctuate from day to day.

Processes that fluctuate according to the needs of the business, department and staff result in unique and unstructured content. The content and processes require a special type of handling, in the form of Intelligent Archiving. The archiving and ECM markets need to radically change their perception of solutions to these unstructured data problems. In an attempt to address this Autonomy is announcing Autonomy Information Governance, the first intelligent information governance platform. Their plan, according to their press release, is to address three cost and risk oriented business processes.

Compliance, Enterprise Legal Hold and Disposition Management are the three business processes driving up costs and creating risks. Compliance is aimed at automating information control to address and enforce internal risks, such as those felt by Siemens in the bribery scandals. Enterprise Legal Hold is aimed at automating and managing the requirement to maintain information for specific legal cases. Finally, disposition management is aimed at managing data retention according to the three-way relationship between the burden of user access, risks to the company and need for legal production.

On Friday April 11th, 2008, Autonomy held a press briefing in San Francisco to inform news agencies of these plans in the wake of sub-prime credit investment issues, federal rules for civil procedure and potential activism around executive pay at failed companies.

At the press briefing, Autonomy had several panelists sharing their thoughts on the subject of unstructured content, risks and business processes. One of the panelists, Browning Marean, partner, DLA Piper US LLP commented on the complexity of the problem, "Millions in legal or internal costs can be incurred just trying to comply with legal hold requests, in addition to fines resulting from not delivering fast enough. It was technology (electronic information) that got us into this mess, and technology will have to get us out." Marean doesn't decry IDOL as the answer, but it is obvious without an index, like Autonomy IDOL, all you have are globs of unstructured data with little or no relationship.

To build and establish a relationship, Autonomy is setting in motion their grand plans for an Intelligent Information Governance Platform. At the center of the platform will be IDOL and the same philosophy that founded the company. Dr. Mike Lynch founded Autonomy on the basis of indexing "human friendly" information so that computers could understand its "meaning" and managing sound. Using that philosophy and associated algorithms, Autonomy will leverage IDOL in this new offering. As we break through the silence on Intelligent Information Governance Platform, you can expect more analysis on it here.