Mimosa Systems is a player in information management space that operates in information immediacy, discovery, continuity, information access, search, retrieval of corporate information with a focus on information management of unstructured and semi-structured data, like email and attachments, instant messages, files and documents, and other new data types.
It is also simultaneously doing some next generation development work with EMC on email archival, besides a hot development pipeline.
In this chat with Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News T M Ravi, co-founder, president, Mimosa Systems, shares some interesting nuggets that come with his experience in archiving, data protection and disaster recovery areas so far as he also talks of evolution, competition, Mimosa's development muscle in view of the new garbs that information management is donning today.
To start with, are there any latest trends that information management on a whole is witnessing?
Yes. There is firstly, explosion of content to deal with that spans across email, documents, instant messaging, IP-based wikis and what not. Information technology managers are struggling in this new era of content deluge.
Then, storage is getting distributed all over posing new challenges of control and access. Virtualization, which is still in the evolutionary stages, is coming up too. Companies are viewing email and decision documents as business records that have to be retained.
Is compliance still a major driver?
It had an initial impetus especially in certain industries, but in the last four years, a general evolution has taken place and new vertical-related regulations along with globalization have made the scenario different.
Thus, there is a trend towards corporate governance and the need to retain, control and manage information. There are also now investigation-driven needs spurred by both external and internal bodies and HR department.
How worried or spurred are you with new competitive strategies around Storage and Security 2.0 coming out of contemporaries like Symantec?
In the archiving space, Mimosa has a differential advantage of being the technology visionary. Players like Symantec are significantly largers with some good stuff in technologies like BackUp. But things are different in the archiving market. Here, old technology is not a good game more so from the point of massive scalability, underlying storage and server infrastructure etc.
The market needs around search and discovery have changed drastically in the last 15 years. Mimosa is not 15 year old at all. Our next-generation architecture is scalable and it is called the elastic grid architecture. Also, archiving touches many flanker areas and is a much bigger market.
Analysts see multiple dollars in the market that is growing beyond Back-up. There are many blossoming markets surrounding archiving number of areas. Another differentiator with Mimosa is scalability. The way we archive is different than anybody’s we put load on the original email server or system.
The first-generation archiving technology puts so much load on the systems that it becomes undeployable and a matter of choice between whether to email or to archive. Mimosa's journey to the next generation has been, in contrast to competition (which has majorly grown through acquisitions), largely organic.
It is very difficult to continue the pace of innovation in large companies. What they are good at is sustaining innovation and in addition of bells and whistles. Much of the innovation is happening in storage 2.0 but customers are smart enough to understand and make out the real edge or the real 2.0.
What is Mimosa's score card like in terms of organic development and patents etc.?
Our organic basket is good and growing with assets like archiving technology, grid scalability, no agents on servers or desktops (which is substantially different from first generation technologies), and easy-to-use user interface. In fact we believe and focus on no-user interface as the best interface.
We have filed 13 to 14 patents around areas like unstructured information management, content archiving, content capture and search.
So what exciting is coming out of this pipeline next?
We have just announced our ability to go after not only email systems but also file systems. We are working on the ability to use Google-like Crawl technology for tracking files and content and in areas like full text indexing, de-duplication and in making the content accessible in a secure manner. That's the big difference between the World Wide Web and the enterprise that we want to cover.
And that is security. Also, our support of files will evolve with file server as the initial offering stage which over the period of time will be integrated with desktop too. Later this year is slated for a software development kit and API for our platform. In the next nine months, we will support a variety of enterprise content management and collaboration applications.
How vital are flavors like analysis and intelligence that the market is weaning on to?
Till date we had some big players like Business Objects in this domain which essentially belonged to structured information. The players here tried to unleash the business value hidden inside the information.
The challenges here were heterogeneity but the value per se was staring in your face, one just needed to deal with integration of different applications.
Today, about 90 per cent of a company's information is unstructured, characterized by poor access and visibility. In this era of knowledge workers, a lot of value resides in email and files, which today, is untapped. Every business process has the potential for better efficiency and performance and for tapping into the inherent value of information.
That's the new face of Business Intelleigence (BI). It's an emerging area. Legal and IT aspects were the focus till today. BT is not quite there, but we will be developing third-party applications in this area.
Has information management become easy or tougher?
When we see the market and big players in this terrain, a sense of commoditization is taking place. There is one layer here and there being added by someone at some point of time. But the real business value and growth is in layers much above. So if you look back, we have evolved from data management to application data and information management.
Now it has to be around content management. At the level of content, one really has to look inside and hence a rationale for discovery, content monitoring.