Oracle addresses archiving

You know when an American West coast-headquartered IT vendor is serious about a product when it gets its press staff to send out releases at 5 am in the morning West Coast time. And that is what happened at the Redwood Shores offices of Oracle USA on Monday when it announced the release of Universal Online Archive 10g (UOA) and the associated Oracle Email Archive Service.

Despite (or potentially in part because of) the downturn in western economies, archiving, including email archiving, appears to be this year's 'must have' product for the enterprise. However, this is not a vendor-driven initiative, unlike a large number of significant IT purchasing decisions that have been made over recent years. This is a direct response to customer demand.

Compliance, risk management, and eDiscovery, all require robust archiving of digital content. According to Oracle one in four US companies being prosecuted have had corporate email subpoenaed as part of the case. Furthermore the fallout from the sub-prime debacle has prompted many financial institutions to invest in solutions to trawl their 'back catalogue' of communications and agreements to identify their potential exposure.

Oracle wants a bit of this archiving pie, and fortunately for the company it has four elements that enable it to address the demand by putting a good sized knife and fork into the pastry meat and gravy.

The first is building the Universal Online Archive platform on top of the Oracle Database, which can cope with both the scale and the variety of content that organisations will need to archive. The second is its HVIE (High-volume Import engine) which can ingest millions of objects per day. Third is the acquisition of high volume content management technology and specialist staff in the guise of Stellent. Lastly is a broad content archiving strategy, not just focusing on email.

The product is focused on holding all historical content, in whichever format, initially from email, but later to include SharePoint, file server, and even ERP content, within a single platform.

As part of the business case development for the product Oracle looked at its own content storage, identifying that 'active' content (with a short 30 day lifecycle) is a much smaller percentage of content stored than that which is 'historical' i.e. rarely accessed, but must be kept for five years or more.

Oracle identified also that archiving does not need the full Enterprise Content Management (ECM) stack, just a highly scalable infrastructure, which could both store, and more importantly retrieve, high-volume, often low-value content from any source.

Importantly Oracle has not made the mistake of thinking that archiving is the same as Records Management, and there is an adapter for Oracle Universal Records Management (EuroView Daily, 10 October 2007). This gives full classification of the content, and a policy-based process of disposition at the end of a record's defined retention period. Here the record is either deleted (with no chance of recovery), retained for a further set period, or in the case of many government records retained in perpetuity.

In Ovum's opinion this announcement is another demonstration of the bringing to fruition the combined capabilities of both the Oracle and former Stellent teams, melding understanding of content types with that of high-volume storage. Good move, very timely.

Author: Mike Davis @ www.ovum.com

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