Smarsh, One of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in U.S.A.

Smarsh Inc. has been named to the Inc. 500 for 2008, Inc. magazine’s 27th annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.

Smarsh ranked No. 184 and will be featured in the September issue of Inc. magazine (on newsstands Aug. 26-Sept. 30). Complete information on this year’s Inc. 500, including company profiles and a list of the fastest-growing companies. Smarsh also ranked No. 3 among the top 50 businesses in the Portland, Ore./Vancouver, Wash./Beaverton, Ore. region, and No. 17 in the top 100 IT services companies.

"This sort of prestigious, national recognition from Inc. magazine and Inc.com validates our company’s commitments to providing unparalleled customer service and perpetual technological innovation," said Stephen Marsh, Smarsh founder and CEO. "This is a gratifying and motivating achievement, and a fantastic milestone for our company."

The 2008 Inc. 500 list measures revenue growth from 2004 through 2007. To qualify, companies must be U.S.-based and privately held, for profit, independent – not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies – as of December 31, 2007, and have had at least $200,000 in revenue in 2004, and $2 million in 2007.

Smarsh revenues grew by 1,322% from 2004-2007, and more than 5,000 clients currently trust Smarsh with their mission-critical data. The company’s client base, originally built by meeting the demanding and sophisticated archiving needs of the financial services industry (including investment advisors, broker/dealers, banks and hedge funds), continues to grow and diversify.

"The marketplace is evolving and opportunities are increasing as more businesses see the cost, performance and risk management benefits of implementing proactive solutions to meet regulatory and litigation-readiness obligations," added Marsh. "Our software-as-a-service model is also attractive to information technology departments for its email server and infrastructure benefits."

With a growing percentage of a company’s intellectual property and corporate knowledge stored in email and other electronic messages, the need to preserve, classify, search, retrieve and protect these valuable records creates overlapping challenges for I.T. departments, compliance and legal officers and human resources management. A wide range of companies, from sole proprietors to small and mid-sized businesses to larger enterprises are adopting Smarsh’s message archiving solutions for a number of reasons:

• Regulatory compliance. Smarsh’s message archiving solutions have set the industry standard for compliance with SEC and FINRA regulations, and Smarsh clients have the flawless regulatory audit track records to show for it. As the worldwide regulatory environment grows more discriminating, archiving and retrieval systems are growing more essential.
• Law firms, inside counsels and legal consultants recognize that using proactive email archiving mitigates risk and provides a reliable solution at a fraction of the cost of a more traditional reactive response to an e-discovery request. Smarsh’s message archiving solutions also provide the tools for enforcing review and retention policies, and placing litigation holds on relevant messages.
• Risk management. Companies need to regulate the information that leaves their organizations packaged in corporate email addresses. Smarsh solutions give clients the ability to monitor and document the use of corporate messaging systems – and intervene if necessary – so that companies can mitigate risk and protect corporate knowledge, transaction records, confidential customer data and intellectual property.

According to a 2008 Osterman Research report, roughly 60% of decision-makers cite growth in messaging storage as a serious or very serious problem. Messaging storage, driven by increasing use of e-mail, larger attachments and the like, is growing at an average of 35% annually. Smarsh’s SaaS model is proving attractive from an IT standpoint because:

• Many companies are finding that in-house solutions have not scaled. As companies have grown, keeping up with the enormous amounts of data in emails and attachments and keeping search and retrieval time down creates massive strain on resources.
• By migrating data from storage on messaging servers to archival storage, overall storage costs can be reduced, while improving messaging server performance and expediting recovery from downtime incidents.
• Upfront hardware and software costs are eliminated, and upgrades and product enhancements are automatic and included as part of Smarsh’s managed service. In addition, Smarsh’s email archiving application and Web interface are proprietary, meaning that technical support comes from those who built the system.
• The use of multiple, mirrored data centers and data security safeguards ensure that all required data is being preserved and available.
• Internal IT personnel can refocus on core competencies rather than wasting time and energy on archiving-related issues like storage, software, database management and server maintenance.
• Smarsh email archiving solutions can integrate with any messaging platform (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus, Novell, for example), and will provide access to each platform’s valued and specialized functionality – webmail, calendar, task functions, for instance – that your organization values. With over 5,000 clients, Smarsh has encountered a variety of system integration scenarios and the company’s integration team manages the deployment process.

2008 has been a busy year at Smarsh. The acquisitions of CentraScan, LLC and Financial Visions, Inc. added services to the Smarsh suite of solutions and additional value to new and pre-existing client relationships. The company introduced version 5.0 of its Smarsh Enterprise Messenger hosted instant messaging solution as well as a second hosted IM proxy option.

Using the sophisticated functionality behind the proprietary automated email review agent, the Virtual Compliance Officer, Smarsh also introduced an intelligent pre-review capability for clients’ outgoing and/or incoming email. The VCO with Data Loss Prevention integrates a company’s email archive with the data security functionality, preventing important corporate knowledge and communication from leaving (or entering) the organization.