Colin Clark, Head of Corporate Business Control, Somerfield Group

Message in a Bottle(neck)

Managing messaging and other previously simple tasks

"Organizations struggle with where to put their data," says Irwin Lazar, principal analyst and program director at Nemertes Research in New York. "There are hundreds of examples of companies that have lost data or have such a distributed data model that there's no centralized mechanism for searching what people have or had in their inboxes. A lot of organizations still rely on local files for storage where you may back up the file, but there's no visibility to what's in that file."

When that data is contained in an email, instant message (IM), or voicemail, the problem is compounded.

Lazar explains: "The biggest thing we talk to clients about is getting their organizations straightened out. They have one group that manages email. They have another group that does content management, another that does IM, and another that does voice, and in a lot of companies none of them talk to each other very well." He adds, "The biggest lesson we try to teach clients is to think about the different ways people communicate in the organization and begin unifying the management around that, so you're planning for collaboration and communication as a unified entity and it's no longer separate applications existing in silos."

Finding the needle in the haystack

Somerfield Group, a chain of 1,200 supermarket and convenience stores in the United Kingdom, uses email several ways. Salespeople negotiate and confirm promotions and deals via email with advertisers, suppliers, and other key business partners. Somerfield also has more than 3,500 Microsoft Exchange users, making storing, searching, and cataloging email a main business driver.

"It's not uncommon for someone to agree to a US$100,000 merchandising deal via email, and forget to bill for that deal," says Colin Clark, Somerfield's head of corporate business control. "With Symantec Enterprise Vault, employees can work autonomously while their supervisors and the company's billing and legal departments search old emails for potential invoices and agreements that might have been overlooked," he explains.

"Say I've been told there's an email dated around the end of November from one of our franchise customers to me. It contains the information required to settle a legal dispute," says Clark. "The idea is to just click on Search, type in the dates, type in the recipient, and hit the button. The program searches 13 million emails and tells me which email it is."

At the same time, the company's servers are freed up because Somerfield Group can store data indefinitely without the need to add additional servers. This is significant since, by law, Somerfield Group must keep six to seven years worth of email communications on file. Since using Enterprise Vault, the company saw a 30 percent immediate cost reduction, with a total three-year reduction of 40 percent, said Clark, and realized an excess of US$5 million in fee recoveries by being able to find and prove previous agreements.

Being able to search an entire repository of email provides an additional benefit, according to Clark. He can make sure employees aren't sending out illegal or sensitive messages from their corporate accounts.

Sometimes Clark, who knows the software well, is surprised at the level of filtering it enables. "A deputy CFO who had recently left knew we'd switched on this system and he sent me an email, which I replied to," explains Clark. "The following week we did the research to see which employees had sent emails with bad language in them, and I came out with the highest score. We retrieved the email from Enterprise Vault. For a laugh, the guy had typed text to me and then in a white font on a white background, he'd typed a string of expletives across the bottom of the email. He did it for a laugh, but I was able to see that I needed mail filtering that would prevent emails with that sort of language coming and going from the business."