Last fall, Iron Mountain Inc., a 51-year-old document archiving company, made a jump into digital world with its Digital Archives outsourced product.
Now the Boston company is looking to shore up its nascent digital presence, with plans to bring customers existing backup servers into its data centers, archive wireless messaging, and archive audio and video files for the imminent rich media trend.
The wireless offerings will be accomplished through partnerships with software vendors who supply to the handheld device industry, and with wireless service providers, said Peter Delle Donne, president of the Digital Archives division. That will begin early next year, followed by the rich media offerings in 2004, he said.
To save money, the company also is consolidating its four data centers into two.
While not revealing who the wireless partners will be, Delle Donne said the technology will intercept wirelessly sent messages and store them, on the fly, into a digital archive. Users could go back to a Web browser months later and call up a wireless message they once sent, and without having proactively saved the message, he explained.
Iron Mountains digital move was largely sparked by increasing governmental rules about how long data must be filed and by corporations needs to access that data instantly, Delle Donne said. Digital services should be 10 percent of the companys business by 2006, he said.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, in Lansing, uses Iron Mountains disaster recovery services, supporting about 2,000 users and about 90 file servers in 15 locations, said Chad Zemer, operations manager. “So far weve moved about 400 gigabytes of data. When alls said and done well probably be up close to a terabyte.” The service is good; its interface needs to be easier to use, he said. Also, “wed like to see improvements to the actual backup system they have now before we look at other services,” Zemer said.
Currently, Iron Mountains 42-employee division has about 50 customers, subscribing to services like electronic vaulting, e-mail and image archiving. Also, Iron Mountain runs the division on 34 terabytes of EMC Corp. Symmetrix storage, despite Delle Donnes prior role as a vice president with Compaq Computer Corp.s enterprise storage division.