See us at these conferences

Greg Arnette speaking about the pros and cons of using stubbing with your archive solution:




George Nichols speaking about cloud computing start-up economics:







Greg Arnette speaking about cloud computing and working with Amazon Web Services:

"Reply to All" Email Storm Hits US State Department

Ask any seasoned email administrator of a large organization and you'll hear a particular tail of woe about a "reply to all" email storm that clogged their message servers and spread like wildfire from one errant "sparking" message. It's the perfect storm of poor technology, poor human behavior, and lack of training.

The United States Department of State had their own "email storm," resulting in this edict:

"A cable sent last week to all employees at the State Department's Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified "disciplinary actions" for using the "reply to all" function on e-mail with large distribution lists."

Not a bad beginning to retraining employee behavior to think twice (or three times) before making a single click "reply to all" and pouring more gasoline on the smoldering email firestorm. While the email storm is a mild inconvenience to the employee, it's hugely disruptive for the IT staff. Hours are wasted clearing queues and nursing the system back to health.

Email, more than any other electronic communication medium, allows free and open communication between colleagues, but this incredible power needs be to wielded carefully because it's so abused now. Poorly written message bodies & subject lines and writing flames that would never be said in person are just a couple of the many downsides to this powerful capability.

We're moving into the "post email world" as 2009 starts. More and more people are demanding better email technology, and as the technology is overhauled to work more efficiently, the users need to take more responsibility by using email effectively. The vendors and the users both need to have some "skin in the game." Services like Twitter and Facebook messaging are getting more popular because email feels "so broken" right now.

In Sonian Labs we're innovating on some really interesting concepts about email productivity. As a hosted email archiving vendor we are in an unique position to have a positive effect on the future of email. Stay tuned!

Forrester predicts over half of enterprises will choose hosted services

Forrester released a very interesting messaging analysis report predicting trends and costs for hosted email versus on-premise.

For companies with less than 15,000 employees hosted had significant savings compared to installed software solutions.

But an even more interesting finding is that more than half of enterprises will blend hosted email services with on-premise email servers. Hosted security and email archiving services are the perfect compliment to an Exchange, GroupWise or Notes server.

Happy New Year!

Team Sonian wishes our customers and business partners a healthy, happy and prosperous 2009.

We're starting the new year on a bright note with new enhancements, more OEM channel partners and stay tuned for some great new features we're creating in our cloud-compute powered hosted email archiving laboratory.

Piecast: Email archiving market to double by 2011

Several trends for 2009-2011 in the email archiving market.

First, the market for archiving will expand from $600 million today to $1.5 billion by 2011. This is seen in pie chart top left, and is predicted by Osterman Research.

Second, 60% of this growth will occur in the small to medium enterprise segment, with more than 70% choosing a hosted service instead of on premise software. The second and third pies indicate this trend.

Sonian's hosted email archiving service will get a big percentage of the archiving pie. :)

Perspective: Of power plants and server rooms

Would you want to be responsible for generating your own electricity? Probably not. Soon the question will be do you want to be responsible for managing your own compute infrastructure? Over time you will decide "probably not."
It's not such a leap to anticipate in the coming years managing a Windows server or an email server on Linux might not be the best use of your IT budget given more pressing problems to be solved. Software as a Service, powered by cloud compute infrastructure, is the next big wave of IT innovation rushing to our shores. With cloud compute, you let others manage your base infrastructure and pay for the resources you consume. The costs scale linear to usage, and you can focus on the more value-add applications to your organization's needs.

Backup versus Archive: Redux

This is not your archive.

This is your backup, maintained in the event you need to recover a file or an entire server. Backups are tape libraries or backup to disk infrastructures. They are not designed for investigative search or analysis.

Archive and backup are cousins to each other, with archive providing the search, e-discovery and work flow capabilities that backup systems do not. Maybe some day in the future combined systems will solve both problems, but the state of the art today is separate systems, with backup maintained on premise, and archive hosted on cloud compute infrastructure.

Local backup and hosted archive is the "win win" scenario IT needs to save money, provide actionable intelligence, and solve the dual needs of search and data recovery.