The Granddaddy of Them All

No, I am not talking about the Superbowl.  I am referring to LegalTech - the trade show that weds attorneys and IT.  Next week corporate counsels, VPs of Litigation, electronic discovery specialists, forensic investigators, internal auditors, and several other important people will gather in New York City to learn about how widgets can make their jobs easier.  All kidding aside, I really enjoy attending this show as a real business problem - litigation processes - can be improved with a variety of technology, and there are measurable benefits for the people who make the right investments.  It will not be about the commericals, the Patriots, or the Giants; it will be about evidence review tools, data restoration services, archiving for evidence preservation and the like.  In that spirit, here is my pre-LegalTech warmup list which is in no particular order.

• I believe that 2008 will be the year of electronic evidence preservation.  In case you do not know, the electronic discovery process is composed of several steps, best outlined by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model.  The concept of legal hold requires organizations to save relevant information during a case.  (Yes there is a much more formal definition, but I defer to those that attended law schools.)  Right now, most digital evidence is preserved on tapes because it is cheap and a central place where most information eventually ends up.  IT keeps the tapes longer and hopefully removes the media from the normal rotation during the legal hold.   This just isn't feasible as the volume of information grows and corporate counsel actually has to retrieve data from them.  I expect search / tagging, archiving and policy / content management software to alleviate current presevation challenges.
• Is there a better place than New York City to hold a legal technology show?  It is where much of the focus on legal discovery started thanks to Eliot Spitzer.  Five years ago, one vendor came to ESG with a slide that had a picture of the former New York Attorney General (now Governor) holding a book 'The Best E-mails I Have Ever Read'.  Classic.  I also remember reading New York Magazine where a member of Spitzer's staff was quoted as saying 'E-mail is the digial equivalent of eavesdropping'.  These guys were onto something as ESG research states that 8 out of 10 electronic discovery events involve e-mail. 
• The tech gal (my wife) cannot believe that I spend so much time talking about technology AND I have yet to figure out how to set or turn off our alarm clock.  I will be looking for something to resolve this issue in the Big Apple.  Attorneys must have a need to turn back time!  (Oops, it's their clients that need the magical time machine.  Sorry.)
• If you are not aware of any of the electronic discovery jargon, you should take notice of some of the technology being developed to search and review evidence.  I am very excited about the use of Natural Language Processing solutions, concept based  navigation and visualization, and several other cool, non-Googlish search technology.  For that alone, I will brave the home of the Yankees and breathtaking conversations about the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and look for something worth 'listing' next week.

What Keeps Me Up At Night

I recently saw Dr. Charles Geschke, the founder of Adobe, speak at a Boston College (I am an alumnus) Technology Council Event. It was one of the more impressive talks I have heard as Dr. Geschke went through some Silicon Valley and Adobe history.  He concluded his remarks with a ‘What Keeps Me Up At Night’ list. Without going into detail, he spoke about some politics, education, and a few other things about Adobe’s business. The most interesting aspect was how these ‘insomnia derivatives’ all tied to his life and business experiences in some way.  In respect to Dr. Geschke, here is my latest BULLETin – the things that keep me awake at night.  The list is not, and never will be, in any particular order.

• The crack ESG research team handed me this stat recently:  Almost 25% of organizations with confidential data in their database applications do not do anything to secure this information when creating copies for test and development, reporting and other purposes. As an analyst, I am supposed to offer some commentary on this data point. Here it goes:  I am now going to have to do my Christmas (and other important days / events) shopping in person as opposed to online. If you are a DBA, how can this happen?  If you want to avoid becoming the next TJX (or another silly company that is part of that 25%) please - I am begging - visit the websites of EMC, Applimation, HP, IBM, Solix, or Symantec and get some information about their respective database archiving solutions as these products help with the security issue in database subsets. I beg because I don’t like visiting shopping malls.
• People in California driving when it’s raining give me nightmares. I purposely look at the forecast a week ahead of time, and switch meetings that cause me to drive when serious rainfall is expected.
• I do worry about U.S.-based technology consumers in 2008. The economy is like a rollercoaster and some customers may miss out on some interesting innovations including more stuff in the server and desktop virtualization worlds. Budget freezes are probably going to happen at some point this year; I just hope that CIOs do not miss the opportunity to kick the tires on products that offer a very quick ROI like:  anything data de-duplication related, server virtualization advanced features for cheap disaster recovery, desktop virtualization so we can all run Mac’s with an XP machine inside, and some real-time, application-specific protection that truly protects against any data loss (some call this CDP).
• I started my career at a storage vendor and we had e-mail mailbox quotas. Irony?  There is no need for any organization to have these silly policies with e-mail archiving solutions and cheap disk available in the market. I sympathize with anyone who has to deal with these productivity killers. If you are one of these employees, Google ‘e-mail archive software’, print out the first page of results and drop them off in the IT department with a note “I would have e-mailed this link to you, but my inbox quota prevented me from sending it’.

Welcome to IT BULLETins

Welcome to my blog.  Before you go anywhere, I am well aware that the IT industry needs another blog like Microsoft needs cash, but I promise a new (and hopefully different) format.  I am calling it ‘IT BULLETin’ because I will write in ‘list' or 'bullet' format - summarizing my opinion.  There will be no more than 5-7 bullets per blog and I will do my best to update it at least twice per week.  If I cannot do it, I very well may have my wife write one or two – and she isn’t a technology person whatsoever.  (I got this idea from the Sports Guy on ESPN who often has his wife write a non-sports entry every now and then, and he is, by far, the funniest sports columnist I have ever read and his wife's columns may be better.).  She will probably write something about the silly technology acronyms that I say on the phone when talking to my peers like iSCSI, SAN, SRM, BPL, BPM, etc.

 

Keeping with my promised theme, here is the first BULLETin so you can get to know me and some of things that I will cover.  The list is, and always will be, in no particular order.

• My favorite television show is Boston Legal with House being a close second.  Why?  I like sarcasm, used to work in a Boston law firm, and enjoy diagnosing any problem. 
• I live in Silicon Valley (I’m a transplant from Boston) and I have learned a couple of things:  There are real hockey fans in San Jose, Google reignited optimism in the Valley, and Stanford is its own micro-economy.
• The technology area that I find most interesting is search / navigation and its application to different business problems.  Right now, most of the talk is about Electronic Discovery and I believe we are only at the beginning of what this stuff can really do.  
• For anyone that thinks server virtualization is a fad, our research shows that 81% of organizations use server virtualization in production environment to some degree, and 46% consider themselves to be running “Tier 1” applications on virtual servers.
• The most underrated technology company is Iron Mountain.  It’s true that the company moves a bit slower than a true Silicon Valley-ish company, but it has a good size data protection and archiving business.  They could use a little more money dedicated to R&D, however, I did talk to some of their customers at a recent event and they came clean with positives and negatives – and the negatives can be fixed with a few more folks in engineering.
• Anyone buying data de-duplication solutions should ask the vendor if they have patents or resolved any patent issues with the ‘de-duplication’ part.  Quantum, Data Domain and Sun have figured out how to make nice through cross licensing agreements.  RFIs and RFPs for de-duplication should call out vendors on this issue because it plays a key role in investment protection.