[Clips] Painkiller

[R. A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:29:10 -0500
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  From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] Painkiller
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<http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/03/emc-legal-discovery-cz_dl_0303emc_print.html>

  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 <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  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'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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'