eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Actiance, a provider of communications compliance, archiving and analytics solutions, announced that IBM will offer the Actiance Platform as part of its Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) product portfolio.
Actiance’s active compliance and archiving platform will further IBM’s cloud-based analytics capabilities and enable customers to govern enterprise communications across more than 70 different communication channels, including email, messaging, collaboration and social.
“ILG is a suite of products IBM has that provides end-to-end lifecycle governance for data,” said James Schellhase, worldwide business leader for Information Lifecycle Governance at IBM. “We have a 100-year legacy of working with companies on this type of thing. The reason we began looking at Actiance was the breadth of their offering and the compatibility with our technology.”
The Actiance Platform, combined with IBM’s pioneering role and deep expertise in the ILG space, will enable companies across industries, including financial services, manufacturing and insurance, to lower the cost and risk of information governance and create and enforce policies for all business communications. Actiance provides a view of the entire information lifecycle through a searchable, Web-scale archive that captures, monitors and governs all conversations in context.
In a blog post about the deal with IBM, Scott Whitney, vice president of product management at Actiance, said companies use of social networks (such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), along with enterprise social software like SharePoint, Jive, Chatter and IBM Connections, and Unified Communications channels like Lync, Jabber and Sametime, continues to rise in popularity while the compliance and regulatory retention environment continues to tighten.
“At the same time, social media and communications content are becoming a more popular target for eDiscovery, social content has doubled annually over the last several years,” Whitney said. “To complicate the situation even further, many organizations aren’t aware that social media must be accessible for discovery, data governance rules and regulatory compliance. Therefore, they are not actively capturing, managing or archiving all communications and social content—potentially placing them at a higher risk of non-compliance and legal jeopardy.”
By teaming up with Actiance, IBM can help its customers more effectively address multiple issues related to migrating their current technology solutions to the cloud.
The Actiance Platform consists of three primary components: Alcatraz, Vantage and Socialite. Alcatraz is a cloud-based archive that consolidates an individual’s identities across sources and enables quick search and a view of conversations across channels, while maintaining context. By journaling and retaining critical enterprise communications, users reduce the time and cost of eDiscovery.
“Every RFP [request for proposal] we see has some sort of requirement for a cloud archive,” Schellhase said.
Meanwhile, Vantage meets organizational security, management and active compliance requirements for real-time enterprise communications and collaboration tools, such as Lync, Jive and SharePoint, and supports all major government and industry regulations, such as those mandated by IIROC (Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada), FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure), FCA/PRA (Financial Conduct Authority/Prudential Regulation Authority), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Sarbanes-Oxley and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And Socialite provides access and control so companies can meet governance and compliance requirements when sharing and engaging on public social networks.
“IBM’s customers have asked for the capability to capture, manage and archive content from new sources, such as social communications channels and collaboration tools, to meet regulatory compliance and eDiscovery requirements,” Whitney said. “At the same time, they want to take advantage of the lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of a unified, cloud-based archiving system.”
Whitney added that Actiance has been servicing regulatory industries for 15 years. “In fact, that’s where we got our name; Actiance is short for ‘Active Compliance,'” he told eWEEK.