Archive360 says many migrations avoid email archives, and leave much services revenue on the table. Their solution is easy to use, and fully compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.
Bob DeSteno, Archive360’s co-founder and CEO
New York-based email archive migration software provider Archive360 has announced its Accelerate Channel program, designed to provide solution providers with a solution to move on-prem email archives to the cloud, while being fully compliant and leaving nothing behind. The company says that many VARs are simply leaving this money on the table – even though it could quadruple their services revenues.
“Archive360 officially came into being in 2012, and was started by a small team of sales and engineering people from Mimosa Systems,” said Bill Tolson, Archive360’s Vice President of Marketing. “Their main product was an on-premise archiving solution, mostly targeting Exchange , which could go in and capture log files.” The company wound up being bought by Iron Mountain, who owned them for a year before selling their digital assets to Autonomy in 2011 – just before Autonomy was bought by HP.
By this point the core group of Mimosa, including the CEO and CTO had left to put Archive360 together.
“We developed some interesting technology that others didn’t have,” Tolson said. “Because Autonomy had stopping supporting Mimosa, we originally focused on migrating Mimosa NearPoint archives. However, Office 365 requests soon started a land rush, so we started developing a lot more connectors to move those up in a fast and efficient way.”
Tolson said that Archive360 developed a solution that allowed the potential for Office 365 email migrations to be fully realized.
“Customers were migrating email to Office 365 and didn’t know what to do with archiving,” he said. “Office 365 offered free archiving, so to take advantage of it, we developed the ability to bypass vendor archive APIs, go into the archive and move information out in a complete and legally defensible manner, with no metadata being deleted.”
Tolson said that Archive360 now has a little over 500 satisfied customers.
“We haven’t lost an account, and have moved a total of between 10-12 petabytes of data,” he said.
“We’ve been pretty quiet on the marketing front, because we have been more focused on developing the product,” said Bob DeSteno, Archive360’s co-founder and CEO. “We realized we had built a better mousetrap. TransVault [the market leader in the space] had built a toolkit for partners to help customers migrate, but most of these migrations were from one on-prem install to another, and were driven by M&As and end-of-life. It was also very labour intensive. We bypassed all of that.”
DeSteno said that the email archiving is the tough part of an Office 365 migration.
“It can lose deals,” he said. “We can either run the migration for the partner, or as we recently rewrote the application to PowerShell, they can use that to run the migration themselves.”
“We have found that huge numbers of Microsoft partners who migrate Exchange or Office 365 either didn’t know enough to ask about moving legacy archives or didn’t want to bring it up because it was too complex and might slow the sale down,” Tolson said. “With PowerShell we make it so easy to do. We work with partners to enable them not to leave the archive behind. Leaving it behind is not a best practice, because it has legal and regulatory ramifications.”
Tolson stressed that their ability to do this seamlessly is a differentiator for them.
Bill Tolson, Archive360’s Vice President of Marketing
“Our technology can migrate the legacy archive in such a way that we can do it in a compliant manner,” he said. “Our competitors move archive in a way that impacts content. They might delete email stubs or change some of the metadata. If there are no legal or compliance issues, that wouldn’t matter, but almost everyone encounters these issues at some point.” While regulated industries are an important target, Tolson noted that most larger companies get multiple discovery requests each month.
The most important component of the Accelerate program is the PowerShell tool, which the company terms a complete migration package in a box.
“Accelerate also includes the support, content and education to bring the partners up to speed,” Tolson said. “This includes a series of collateral we have created for partners can use, like call scripts to use with end users.”
Tolson also indicated that the program is directed at helping partners realize this capability is there and they are leaving money on the table by participating.
“We want to do it in a responsible manner and in a way where we can show partners that by asking a couple of questions of the customer they can increase their revenue by 3-4x,” he said. “It’s an easy process to get that multiplier. There’s not a whole lot they have to do. Part of the sale is just showing the customer they need to do this to avoid future problems.”
The program is a single tier one, at least to start. Archive360 currently has about 35 partners, and they want to significantly increase that with partners who are focused on doing migrations.
“My measure of success would be tripling the number of partners in the next 12 months, and have the vast majority actively doing deals,” Tolson said.
