IBM Brings Business Analytics and Cloud Services to Smarter Archiving

IBM Corp. announced new offerings to provide organizations with analytics capabilities to make better use of their archived information and improve business processes. The new offerings support IBM’s unified archiving strategy, called IBM Smart Archive, and are designed to help clients use content analytics and data discovery to determine which information is necessary to retain and archive, eliminating a major obstacle many clients have experienced in past archiving projects.

As a result of data growth, legal discovery requirements, regulatory compliance, and increasingly complex infrastructures, the need for information archiving is rapidly increasing. With these growing requirements for retention of information, organizations are struggling to determine what information they have, what to keep and what to discard.

The new offerings unify and simplify content, email and data collection and classification in a comprehensive approach, enabling multiple archiving models, including traditional on premise software, cloud services and hybrid options. With this offering, IBM is providing clients with the flexibility to choose between – or combine – delivery options to archive information that continues to grow within their organization.

"As our clients deal with the reality of budgetary constraints, they are realizing that keeping everything is not a workable strategy," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. "To deal with growing volumes of information, clients need to retain only what they need. IBM is helping clients do this with a comprehensive set of software, hardware and service offerings, that will help ensure that critical information is properly retained."  

France’s National Railway
Embraces a Smart Archiving Approach

Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF) provides high speed train travel in Europe, serving approximately 63 million citizens including thousands of riders from neighboring European countries.  

Handling approximately 700,000 ticket transactions per day, SNCF is using IBM technology to build a unified archive solution to manage and control its growing structured and unstructured content such as historical transactional ticket information, e-mail, invoices and other financial documents.  

Prior to building the new archiving environment, SNCF had difficulty finding key pieces of information related to ticket transactions. The information was stored in multiple locations, impacting SNCF’s customer satisfaction and the company’s need to meet and regulate compliance requirements. With the new system, SNCF will now be able to better find and report on ticket transactions, enabling the company to quickly answer customer queries and general business requests.

"With the volume of ticket sale transaction records and documents growing, we knew that we needed a ‘universal archiving backbone’ to manage, control and analyze all of our content," said Pascal Le Borgne, archiving project manager, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fers Francais. "IBM is helping us to create a simple search and retrieval system for virtually all types of information."

IBM Smart Archive offerings
New offerings that support IBM’s archiving approach of combining content and data capabilities include:

• InfoSphere Content Assessment: Using content analytics, this new offering helps organizations rapidly assess unmanaged content to identify high-risk and valued content such as corporate records that need to be secured, retained and managed throughout its lifespan. The software simultaneously detects unnecessary content eligible for decommissioning, creating the opportunity to dramatically reduce production system burdens and the associated storage requirements.
• InfoSphere Content Collector: This offering adds a variety of new capabilities including support for Microsoft SharePoint. Content Collector for Email and Content Collector for File Systems have also been enhanced. All Content Collector offerings are based on a modular, extensible architecture that monitors, identifies, and collects virtually all content types from e-mail, file systems, Microsoft SharePoint and more. Content Collector can enhance archive content by tasking, filtering, transforming, extracting metadata and classifying to better find and manage archived content.
• InfoSphere Content Collector integration with IBM Optim Data Growth Solution: InfoSphere Content Collector now supports the Optim Data Growth Solution, which is designed to help to reduce database size to improve performance and reduce costs. The new offering enables a unified approach to data and content archiving through common collection and classification technologies that improve infrastructure performance, increase storage cost savings and make all information available for records management, eDiscovery and other needs throughout the information lifespan.
• InfoSphere Classification Module: The new version automates the enhancement and creation of trusted meta data as part of automating content categorization decisions by analyzing the full text of documents and e-mail, enabling consistent, defensible classification decisions that accelerate time-to-value and saves employees valuable time.
• InfoSphere Enterprise Records: The latest version scales to as many as 20 million records per day and improves physical records handling. It manages all records throughout their lifespan regardless of type, media or storage location.
• IBM Information Archive Cloud Services: A preview of a new IBM Enterprise Content Management and Global Technology Services’ Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that reduces upfront capital expense and ongoing operational costs, stores critical data such as e-mail in a security-rich offsite facility, lowers storage costs and improves operational efficiency. This service will be operated by Business Continuity and Resiliency Services.