E-mail sleuthing made easy

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"What they're doing is quite interesting," said Michael Osterman, head of Osterman Research, which focuses on Internet messaging. "It's the next step beyond archiving."

That said, Osterman thinks Clearwell and others like it may have a difficult time selling their e-mail archive add-ons, because a majority of companies don't do any archiving at all. The ones that do, mainly companies in regulated industries, tend to do only what the law requires. "The challenge is getting the market to appreciate the value of this," he said.

Constellation Energy, one of three or so initial Clearwell customers, is a fan. E-mail search requests that used to take days now take hours, Petruzzi said. Sifting through the e-mail archive, a Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System, was "very manual and labor intensive" before he installed Clearwell last fall, he said. It had required a team of five or so people to grab and parse data.

Now, with the lighter workload, he said he expects to reassign two employees to other, more "strategic" work. That's a benefit for the company, because of intensified federal regulation.

To sort messages by relevance, Clearwell's program weighs the background data and content of each e-mail for several factors, including the name of the sender, names of recipients, how many replies the message generated, who replied, how quickly replies came, how many times it was forwarded, attachments and, of course, keywords. The program can also focus searches on a particular department or office location. Filters remove redundant results.

"No other product really sits there and analyzes properties of e-mails like we do," Hilaly said.

He said it takes only a few days to install and configure the software, which sits behind customers' firewalls. It took Constellation Energy just under 10 days from start to finish. It's designed to work with Microsoft Exchange, and it is also compatible with many of the major e-mail archive programs. The starting price of the program is $50,000, which covers 100 gigabytes of e-mail.

Gartner analyst Carolyn DiCenzo said customers can justify the cost of the product several ways. In addition to quick responses to investigations, executives can use the software to analyze their operations, because e-mail holds many clues to customer, product and employee issues. Yet the pain of legal and regulatory investigations remains a lead selling point.

"The money is in legal discovery," she said. "You only have to win one lawsuit or prevent one and you pay for the technology."