Will Iron Mountain be the First Content Cloud?

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 couple of weeks ago Kapow Technologies and StrikeIron announced a new partnership to deliver web data services in a pay-as-you-go model. The promises of service oriented architecture are well known and broadly adopted, especially among large enterprise and government IT departments. I was able to sit in on a demo on the offering and thought it worthy of further discussion. An enormous amount of data remains locked behind legacy applications and retrofitting them to support RSS or other web services is often complicated , expensive and difficult to cost justify in these challenging economic times. Kapow’s solution offers a way to rapidly service enable applications that otherwise might never be accessible to modern tooling. Continue reading “Kapow and StrikeIron – Affordable SOA” →

October 28, 2009

What happens when clouds blow away

I hate to say I told you so. No I don’t – I actually enjoy it. What I don’t like is talking about bad news that cost people jobs and make businesses suffer needless losses. According to this account in NetworkWorld, customers of The Linkup have suffered enormous data loss and the company is shutting down. All of the commentary on the efficiencies of cloud computing and SaaS seldom talk about the inherent risk in surrendering your personal information or the lifeblood of your business (your data) to the watchful eyes of a company you can’t hold accountable.

The hosts are often much bigger than the individual clients making recourse difficult and nobody ever believes the EULA when it says “it’s not our fault if we loose all your stuff.” This doesn’t make the benefits of the cloud less compelling but it screams for better due diligence when selecting a vendor. Good news I suppose for EMC/Mozy as people run to ever bigger players for warm fuzzies.

August 12, 2008

Open Text buys into the DAM SaaS Market

Open Text expands into the Dgital Asset Management Software as a Service market with the acquisition of eMotion ,the Media Management division of Corbis corporation. OT is re-branding the unit under their banner as Artesia On Demand for Marketing. This continues an emerging pattern of targeted small acquisitions to “check the boxes” in the catalog. (ref. the Spicer announcement earlier this week)

As compared to the other ECM players, this is especially interesting as their competition tends to work through partners and not put their commercial brand out front. Perhaps it is a bit of Microsoft see, Microsoft do as Redmond’s latest MOSS SaaS offering leaves no doubt as to whose product is providing the service.

July 11, 2008

SaaS Content Management – Don’t Forget the Prenup!

In a post from October Alan Pelz-Sharp lamented over the ECM SaaS Dilemma. While his points on technical integration issues are well founded – there is a dimension of the issue that API’s and architecture don’t directly address.

In ages past I was responsible for evaluating content management solutions for a Fortune 50. In the role I would often be approached by business units that had found a hosted content management or collaboration solution tailored to their specific business need. (hosted is what we used to call it – yes – I know the difference) Even armed with an enterprise license of Documentum and eRoom, it was difficult and often impossible to compete with point solutions marketed to very narrow business requirements.

Continue reading “SaaS Content Management – Don’t Forget the Prenup!” →