Like many investment firms, ML Stern has long taken seriously its responsibility to store and archive email. As a result, its email archiving and retention system had been installed years ago.

“It was prehistoric,” complains Mike Urman, ML Stern senior vice president of marketing and operations.

The first phase of implementation, capturing new email and archiving it in the Fortiva system, can generally be set up in a day, says Dales.

Indeed, though it doesn’t always register in headlines as a pressing issue, and often seems like a problem that was solved long ago, email archiving and retention continues to be a headache for many financial firms. In fact, Gartner predicts that the email archiving market will grow to $921 million by 2010, representing a compound annual growth rate of 44.4 percent. Many firms in the market have long had solutions, and are looking for improvements in efficiency and email archiving management.

For ML Stern, based in Beverly Hills, CA, with five other offices in California and one in Nevada, the third-party legacy-based system it had in place in-house had not been upgraded sufficiently over the years, and when it went down, it sometimes took email down with it.

“We began looking at competitors; we’re not in the technology business, we’re in the investment business,” Urman says.

In the end, the firm opted to scrap the in-house system it had been using and go with a hosted solution from Fortiva.

“We just liked the simplicity of it. The archive process is offsite, retention is offsite,” Urman says.

With Fortiva, a firm gets an appliance running Fortiva software that interacts with the firm’s Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory, explains Rick Dales, Fortiva’s vice president of product management. The appliance, together with Exchange and Active Directory, captures the data, encrypts it and sends it to Fortiva’s infrastructure for storage. The Fortiva storage infrastructure, made up of hundreds of servers, is how the vendor spreads the cost of storing large volumes of data across many customers. The Fortiva software then helps the client search for and retrieve email stored both in Exchange and in its own infrastructure quickly and easily.

Fortiva also helps implement some business rules.

“There is sometimes some consulting work involved in permissions,” Dales explains, noting that retrievals may be set up in a way so that one group of users can view all emails, and another group of users can only view their own past emails.

Implementations can vary depending on what type of email archiving rules and system a client firm has in place, if any, when the project begins.

“In the case of ML Stern there was already an email archiving system in place so it was more about converting the existing rules to a new system,” he says.

For ML Stern, Urman recalls that the implementation was a two-step process, beginning with all the new emails flowing into the system, followed by a second step where archived emails were migrated to Fortiva. The first stage, he recalls, was very quick.

Dales says that implementation structure is fairly typical. “In general, setting up the first phase of the process for capturing new mail can go up in a day. The harder part is establishing a system for archiving the older mail and generally it’s a matter of ensuring everyone agrees on procedures,” he says.

Urman says in terms of management, the new system is a big improvement.

“It’s far better than what we had before. One person could do it, it’s like dealing with a jukebox,” he says.

Searching for emails, by keyword or other factors, is like conducting a search in Outlook or Google, very intuitive and familiar, Dales says.

Turning to a hosted solution has not changed the number of staff they have overseeing the email process, but it has allowed the firm to trim technology infrastructure costs and has brought peace of mind.

“[With the previous system] I wasn’t comfortable with the retention and retrieval aspect of it. We had all this tape around,” he says. “Now we have done away with two servers that no longer do backup, and we have had no downtime in over a year.”

www.mlstern.com

www.fortiva.com