Unstructured Data Management Platform by Start-Up Digital Reef

Digital Reef, one of Matrix Partners’ and Pilot House Ventures’ premier portfolio companies, announced a new approach to discovering and managing unstructured and semi-structured data. The Digital Reef solution helps large enterprises deal with key business issues that cannot be properly addressed using traditional solutions. These issues include eDiscovery, data risk mitigation, knowledge reuse, and strategic storage initiatives—all of which stem from lack of control over unstructured data, and require a degree of scalability and performance that traditional solutions cannot provide.

Unstructured and semi-structured data in documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations account for up to 85 percent of enterprise data. As the volume of data expands unchecked, enterprises take on more expense and more risk. This is particularly true in the current economic climate, which is driving an increase in lawsuits and related electronic discovery initiatives—one area that clearly illustrates the risk and expense associated with unmanaged stores of unstructured data.

"Digital Reef has introduced a compelling solution at a critical time when the growth of unstructured data is burdening the enterprise with cost and risk," stated Tony Asaro, founder and senior consultant, The INI Group. "Unstructured data volumes are creating a dramatic negative impact on key business processes. What is needed is rapid access to relevant data for legal discovery and compliance audits as well as the ability to leverage existing intellectual property for extending competitive advantage."

Digital Reef was designed to rapidly address very large stores of unstructured data, without manual effort or disruption to data center or business activity. The Digital Reef solution provides enterprises a set of analysis and classification tools that allows them to manage critical data that they had little or no control over previously.

It enables them to:

• Locate specific kinds of data, including sensitive data like Social Security and credit card numbers
• Identify regulated data for compliance
• Pinpoint relevant documents for pending legal action
• Find intellectual property that can be reused for competitive advantage

"Most large enterprises have spent years and invested millions of dollars developing, securing, and managing structured data in databases," stated Steve Akers, CEO and founder of Digital Reef. "With the majority of an enterprise’s data assets in unstructured or semi-structured forms, these organizations need a way to maximize their information’s value while minimizing its risk. Digital Reef will help them do just that."

Digital Reef is emerging from stealth mode after two years of developing its unstructured data management platform and achieving early customer traction under the name of Auraria Networks. Leading organizations in industries such as technology, law and legal services, management consulting, publishing, and government use Digital Reef to address issues such as early case assessment, storage reclamation, knowledge management, and data discovery for risk mitigation and compliance. Digital Reef, as Auraria Networks, recently received $10 million in B Round funding from Matrix Partners and Pilot House Ventures Group. Digital Reef solutions are now generally available.