Sonian Hosted Archiving Services » News

Sonian nominated for award at MassNetComms

Greg Arnette — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:24:22 +0000

Sonian CEO George Nichols (l) and CTO Greg Arnette (r) atteneded the recent MassNetComms awards dinner. Sonian was nominated for best cloud and virtualization data management company.

Sonian is a Judge's Choice Winner at Under the Radar Conference

Greg Arnette — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:48:05 +0000

Sonian is a 2009 Under the Radar Conference Winner in the Data Management category. We are thrilled to be recognized by the judge’s panel as an innovator in cloud compute and IT services. View the 6 minute speed pitch at www.undertheradar.com

We’ll display the video in a separate post.

AWSome! – We're a finalist in the AWS Startup Challenge

Greg Arnette — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Sonian’s cloud compute powered archiving service, running on the AWS infrastructure, is a finalist in the 2008 Startup Challenge.

We’re looking forward to some spirited business competition with the other finalist, and congratulate all the other companies that made the cut.

Video interview: Jeff Barr describes Sonian's use of AWS

Greg Arnette — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:27:00 +0000

Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr describes how Sonian uses AWS for our new hosted archive system.

Watch the brief video here.

White House E-Mail Case Clears Another Hurdle

Greg Arnette — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:03:00 +0000

The White House email archiving fiasco is under further scrutiny. eWeek is reporting that a District Court Judge has ruled the White House must participate in some type of limited discovery activities.

Rejecting the White House Office of Administration’s contention that it is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the OA (Office of Administration) to participate in limited discovery.
With Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling, the CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) can continue its campaign to find documents prepared by the White House OA assessing the scope of the missing White House e-mail problem and its proposed recovery plan.

The lost emails issue will be recorded in the history books along with other communication data losses, such as the Watergate-Nixon tape erasures in the 1970′s and Fawn Hall thinking she deleted IBM PROFS messages as Iran-Contra blew open in the 1980′s.

Today Show Highlights Email Archiving Issues in the Workplace

Greg Arnette — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:45:00 +0000

The Today Show broadcast a five minute news and interview segment describing how companies are increasingly using email archiving and monitoring tools to police company communication systems. Despite a trend toward IM, Sharepoint, Wiki’s and Blogs to replace email, most people still use email to communicate about personal and business issues.

It’s not often email issues are discussed on a national news show. For those of us who fight the daily battle to keep email running and ensure “clean, certified and compliant” communications, it’s gratifying to see mainstream media talk about the issues email administrators face on a daily basis.

Email surveillance is an unfortunate consequence of our modern office-life experience. But organizations have to draw a fine line between protecting the privacy rights of employees, versus the rights of the company to know if a rogue employee is leaking intellectual property, harassing a co-work via email, or spending all day sending and receiving personal messages.

Anti-spam and Basic Compliance are now a Commodity

Greg Arnette — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:42:00 +0000

The Big News this week is Google/Postini’s dramatic price drop for hosted email security and basic compliance services.

Every anti-spam or compliance company currently slogging it out in this competitive market will need to re-align their pricing to match what Google has done – pushed the market into a commodity status and called the industry “to the mat” to justify their much higher pricing structures. And really, why should anti-spam and basic compliance filtering cost a lot anyway? I have heard from one anti-spam vendor that currently charges a Fortune 100 company $80,000 a month, that the comparable Google/Postini pricing would be $13,000 for the same class of service. That’s a huge difference, and one which will get the attention of every IT decision maker looking to save money. Customers will start to ask their current vendors for price concessions, and some vendors who are not optimized for commodity pricing because of their high infrastructure costs will experience some pain.

Appliance and software-based anti-spam vendors will also feel the heat. With Google’s $3 per user per year pricing, the TCO tilts toward SaaS as the most economical (and perhaps reliable) way to get rid of spam. Does it really make sense these days to own and maintain a hardware appliance or software-based spam filter?

Who really knows if Google is taking a loss at these new lower prices to get more traction. They seem willing to seed the market for a long-term gain. And since Google is all about capturing as much data about everything, capturing data about spam and compliance feeds their voracious appetite for analytics.

One potential sting Google could feel is their privacy history. Will Google really resist the temptation not to analyze content information for future metrics, and eventually revenue? Competitors could force Google to “prove” there is no content leakage between the spam filtering side of the business and the search business.

3…2…1… and we have Lift Off – Sonian has Launched

Greg Arnette — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:13:00 +0000

George, Jeff, Tim and I, along with our excellent engineers and marketing folks, launched Sonian Hosted Archive SA2 this week.

More than a year in development and leading edge in so many ways, we thank our investors and advisors for their support and guidance. Everything is coming together nicely as we “on board” new customers into their hosted archiving experience.

At the heart of Sonian’s mission is the core belief that archiving for both compliance and storage management should be affordable and accessible to all companies and organizations, no matter their size or IT budget wealth. And affordable does not mean sacrificing security and reliability. On the contrary, we think Sonian, from our customer’s point of view, is the most secure and reliable of any hosted archive service. We knew security and reliability were two critical concerns our customers would have when thinking of using a hosted service to archive their data. Cost is the third concern. Sonian is the right combination of technology and business model to meet all three concerns.

Jeff Barr Writes about Sonian on the AWS Blog

Greg Arnette — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:48:00 +0000

We’re getting ready to launch the hosted email archive service this week and spent some time briefing Amazon’s Jeff Barr about Sonian. Jeff posted a great summary on how Sonian works with Amazon Web Services to achieve fantastic reliability and scalability for our hosted archive service. This means all our customers benefit from the Amazon data center technology advances in virtualization, reliability, performance and security.

It’s clear SaaS will play an ever larger role in IT deployments. And it’s also crystal clear that cloud-compute infrastructure is the best way to deploy a SaaS system. Sonian is leading the way to the future in how SaaS should be created and managed.

Fascinating new book: "Where Have all the Emails Gone?"

Greg Arnette — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:29:00 +0000

Hot off the press, and courtesy of Amazon Prime delivery, is David Gewirtz’s new book Where Have all the Emails Gone.

This is a must read for anyone who is involved in the messaging industry and wants to learn from the mistakes of a botched real-world compliance, retention and archiving installation.

From the back cover: “Email at the White House is deep, personal, candid, unfiltered communication within the leadership of the most powerful nation on Earth… and it’s very, very broken.”

Enough said. Check it out for yourself.