--- begin forwarded text
Delivered-To: clips@philodox.com
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:29:10 -0500
To: Philodox Clips List
From: "R. A. Hettinga"
Subject: [Clips] Painkiller
Reply-To: rah@philodox.com
Sender: clips-bounces@philodox.com
http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/03/emc-legal-discovery-cz_dl_0303emc_print.htm...
Forbes
Legal
Painkiller
Daniel Lyons 03.03.06, 12:00 PM ET
BOSTON -
Companies have turned into data pack rats, stashing millions of e-mail
files and other documents. And why not? Saving stuff is easy, and cheap,
thanks to ever-declining prices on disk and tape drives.
Just one problem: Some companies now have so much stuff saved that it takes
forever to sift through mountains of material to find anything. Complying
with discovery requests in a lawsuit can cost more than $1 million as
companies sometimes need to hire extra staff to cull through records.
"It's a very broken business process. Companies just don't have tools to do
this in the right way," says Andrew Cohen, associate general counsel and
compliance practice lead at EMC, the king of data storage hardware and
software. "Sometimes the cost of discovery can be higher than whatever
settlement ends up getting paid in a lawsuit."
Seeing an opportunity, EMC this week rolled out an all-in-one "e-Discovery
Solution" that combines EMC storage hardware, document management software
and consulting services. The idea is to put a document storage
infrastructure in place so that companies can find documents in less time.
"We come at this in a proactive way, at a very high level," says Cohen.
"We're saying you can save money by managing your information in a
proactive and smarter way up front, by thinking about what information
belongs in the repository and also by having the right tools to manage that
information."
Cohen, 41, knows first-hand how painful these discovery requests can be.
For the past seven years he has been an associate general counsel at EMC,
handling employment lawsuits and compliance issues. "We went through a lot
of pain, and spent a lot of money just for data processing costs on some
pretty routine discoveries. That got my attention," Cohen says.
A year ago, Cohen changed hats and became a product manager of sorts,
assembling a solution that EMC could sell to big corporations to help them
manage legal discovery in a more efficient way.
He says customers are eager to hear about EMC's solution. One of the first
to sign up was MasterCard, the Purchase, N.Y.-based credit card issuer.
For Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, the push into services is all part of an
ongoing transformation which began in 2001, when industry veteran
JosephTucciJoseph Tucci took over as chief executive.
In the 1990s, EMC had boomed simply by selling giant storage boxes to
customers who had a seemingly unlimited appetite for disk space. But in
recent years, things have changed. Though companies are still adding data
at a fast clip, they're now looking for more than just big boxes. They also
need help managing vast repositories of data, which can reside in different
places and on different media--some on tape, some on various kinds of
disk-based systems.
Toward that end, over the past few years, EMC has quietly transformed
itself into a seller of services and software to go with its hardware.
Since 2003, the company has spent $4 billion acquiring more than a dozen
software companies, including Documentum, Legato and VMware.
EMC also has created a 9,000-employee services division whose consultants
help customers develop strategies for managing giant repositories of data.
EMC calls this "information life cycle management."
Tucci's push into software and services has paid off. In 2005, those two
areas accounted for slightly more than 50% of EMC's overall revenues. Last
year, EMC earned $1.1 billion on sales of $9.7 billion, up from $871
million on sales of $8.2 billion in 2004. Looking ahead, this year analysts
expect EMC to reap revenues of just over $11 billion.
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
_______________________________________________
Clips mailing list
Clips@philodox.com
http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips
--- end forwarded text
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'