Mail & messaging Toolkit

Email analysis tools finding their feet

Alorie Gilbert CNET News.com

Published: 26 Jan 2006 17:30 GMT

John Petruzzi had a job that, until recently, few people would envy.

As director of enterprise security at Constellation Energy, Petruzzi is the go-to guy whenever regulators request email records from the $12.5bn Baltimore utility and energy wholesaler. For years, Petruzzi has spent more than his fair share of weekends and long nights at the office, combing through terabytes of data on email servers.

"We're talking about large amounts of data: millions of emails over a three-to-six-month period among hundreds of employees," Petruzzi said. "It has been a rather arduous process, obviously. I had teams that worked days on end."

Similar complaints are spurring software entrepreneurs who focus on easing this kind of sleuthing. One of them is Aaref Hilaly, chief executive of Clearwell Systems. Hilaly says the time is ripe for innovation as lawyers, regulators and executives come to view email as a major source of evidence and facts.

Clearwell, a 30-person company in Santa Clara, California, launched this week with the official introduction of its product, the Clearwell Email Intelligence Platform. The product makes sifting through millions of emails to find relevant messages almost as easy as an Internet keyword search on Google, Hilaly said.

"The business climate has changed a lot in the last few years, post-Enron and post-Eliot Spitzer," said Hilaly, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur tapped by Sequoia Capital to run Clearwell. "Courts have become a lot more active. Email has come to be viewed as a source of truth. If you want to know what really happened, you look at the email. That's why companies are storing more and more of it, and referring back to it."

Hilaly sold his previous company, a software administration company called CentreRun, to Sun for $66m in 2003. Sequoia Capital, which has a $4m stake in Clearwell, also invested in that company.

A typical request for email in a legal discovery situation requires 1,300 hours of labour and costs more than $100,000, Clearwell estimated. With its software, Clearwell promises to shave off much of that cost and time. The company has applied for patents on its technology and is hoping it can grab the lead in an emerging market.

Other start-ups, including Orchestria in New York and MessageGate in Bellevue, Washington, offer email search tools.

Bigger players like Computer Associates, EMC, HP, IBM, Symantec and Zantaz already offer some basic search capabilities in their email archiving programs. For example, EMC touts its ability to search email, instant messages and other business data across multiple systems, including Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM Lotus Domino server. It's also readying a new legal investigator tool, which offers "evidence production" features, for release in a couple...

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