Mimosa Systems acquisition by Iron Mountain was an interesting surprise. Interesting in that it brings the oldest records management company into the forefront of the latest in eDiscovery. Iron Mountain was started in 1950 when an abandoned iron mine in Kentucky was used to store bank records and is now located in over 39 countries. Mimosa Systems was started in 2005 focusing on eDiscovery. But what does this acquisition mean?
A quick note for those that don’t know Iron Mountain, they are just that. A temperature and humidity controlled environment to store physical and electronic documents. Daily, truck loads of documents are off loaded by forklifts and ferried deep into the earth to be retrieved by “somebody some day.” Their move to electronic world is something new.
This is the second acquisition by Iron Mountain in the software space, they acquired Accutrac, a records management software vendor, in 2007. Accutrac became part of their Compliant Records Management Program that allowed business the ability to manage their records content as a subscription services. This is a viable option for the small and middle market where in-house records management software might be out of reach. Iron Mountain has also developed a format for which ECM platforms, like EMC Documentum, and collaboration platforms, like Microsoft SharePoint can store information electronically into the mountain.
Mimosa now extends this service to support email and other content formats. Content I like to call active content, where large volumes of data are created almost hourly. Add to this their support of legal eDiscovery process and you may have a viable option for the middle market. The questions I have is will they continue to invest in this emerging technology?
Oddly enough the one place that hasn’t been talking about the cloud seems to have a cloud forming above them.
