network—including desktops, laptops, file systems, Internet servers, and other content repositories—looking for documents relevant to a discovery request.
According to Ferguson, all three products have been designed with help from lawyers inside EMC’s own compliance practice. “We have a whole team of lawyers who speak the same language as our customers and can explain the implications of things like the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” says Ferguson.
While the old EmailXtender product was intended in part to help protect companies against litigation risks, it needed to be extended, so to speak, to help companies comply with discovery requests faster and more concisely. “We’ve been in this [compliance] space for a while, but what you’re seeing with the SourceOne announcement is a family of products that gets us more explicitly into different areas of the EDRM, offering products that go further downstream,” Ferguson says. By “downstream,” she means going beyond simple archiving tasks into the processes of identifying, preserving, and reviewing internal communications before they’re actually handed over.
Ferguson says a 1,000-person company could get the SourceOne family of applications up and running for less than $50,000, and that the software will likely pay for itself within the first year through reduced legal compliance costs.
SourceOne is a homegrown New England product. While EMC’s content management and archiving business is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA, the SourceOne family is actually being developed at EMC’s Nashua, NH, office, according to Ferguson. That office was formerly part of Legato, which had acquired a company called OTG, which had acquired a Nashua-born message archiving startup called xVault. All three of xVault’s original founders—Chris Rowen, Chris Gray, and Jerry Jourdain—are still with EMC, Ferguson says.
