Hummingbird, Veritas Tackle E-Records Management

The two companies join forces to provide a solution to help organizations better manage electronic records.

Content management vendor Hummingbird Ltd. has joined forces with leading storage software vendor Veritas Software to provide a joint solution designed to help organizations better manage electronic records.

The alliance will combine Hummingbird Enterprise for enterprise content management with e-mail and content archiving software Veritas Enterprise Vault 6.0. By combining the two products, the companies hope to provide end-to-end lifecycle management for e-mail and attachments, instant messages, and file system documents.

The combination of Veritas Enterprise Vaults scalable e-mail archival capability and Hummingbirds ability to manage the lifecycle of e-mail messages and related documents will allow customers to better manage electronic records, comply with a host of regulations, simplify management of documents and e-mail, and aid in retention and retrieval, said Andrew Pery, chief marketing officer and senior vice president at Toronto-based Hummingbird.

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"Our customers want a scalable content repository, but at the same time they want to be able to move e-mail to a less expensive storage medium," he said. "Veritas, through Enterprise Vault, offers a scalable e-mail archival capability that will be tightly integrated with Hummingbird so our customers can move from managing documents and e-mails to archiving them and retrieving them when there is a discovery or protest, or when they have to do so to meet regulatory requirements."

The offering will use the standard look and feel of Microsoft Outlook, the most commonly used interface for many organizations. Using this interface will help simplify the management of documents and e-mail, Pery said.

"A user can drag and drop an e-mail into a Hummingbird content repository and automatically inherit the profile information like how long the information should be kept or what retention and disposition rules must be followed," he said. The system also automatically classifies documents based on the organizations stated business rules, such as what should happen to e-mail once an in-box reaches a certain limit or where e-mails older than 45 days should be archived, he said.

Retention and retrieval also become easier, Pery said, because the system allows organizations to define retention rules for documents and e-mail while providing extended searching functionality that allows users to search for e-mails, documents and attachments in both the content and archive repositories.

Hummingbird and Veritas are the first e-mail archiving and records management companies to band together in a way that creates a truly integrated solution, said Kenneth Chin, a research vice president at Gartner Inc., of Stamford, Conn. IBMs e-mail archiving solution, called IBM DB2 CommonStore, for example, isnt well-integrated with its records manager product, while EMCs Email Extender isnt yet integrated with its Documentum Records Manager. "There really are very few truly integrated solutions out there today," Chin said.

But that will change, he said, over the next few years. Gartner believes that by 2007, the two technologies will combine to provide more options for users, both within companies and across companies, much like Hummingbird and Veritas have done.

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