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Email has become the de facto communications medium for businesses worldwide.
Not only is the volume of email traffic growing over 30 percent per year, but so
is the value of the data it captures. Analysts estimate that nearly 70 percent
of a company’s business-critical information resides in the messages and
attachments sent through its email system. As a result, corporate email systems
have evolved to become the repository of record for a company’s intellectual
property.
The emergence of email as a corporate record repository raises a host of new
challenges, particularly in this age of increased emphasis on regulatory
compliance and legal discovery. How do businesses store, organize and manage the
staggering volume of email information generated each day? How can companies
exploit this vast repository of data to satisfy increasingly stringent
regulatory requirements? How can IT leverage the investments they have already
made in their email infrastructure to analyze literally millions of messages?
How can corporate executives quickly identify and extract the specific,
important data they need, when they need it, in response to legal requests?
Email Archiving solutions have taken a first step towards addressing these
challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities by ensuring the storage of all
emails. But it does little good if enterprises don’t have the ability to
analyze this information and extract actionable intelligence from it.
Enterprises need “Email Intelligence,” a new class of analytical
solutions that discover, organize and analyze the information contained in
corporate email systems. Just as business intelligence products like Cognos or
Business Objects enable executives to extract intelligence from the data
captured in databases, Email Intelligence solutions do the same for corporate
email systems. A robust Email Intelligence solution, as dictated by customers
and analysts, must go beyond keyword search tools or legal discovery products.
It must provide a single interface into all email repositories—Exchange
Servers, PST files, Journaling Servers and Archives. It must provide
sophisticated analytics capabilities such as discussion threads, the ranking of
email search results based on relevance, and dashboards with drill-down
capabilities. The solution must scale to analyze terabytes of data and must be
easy to use, deploy and maintain.
If storing email is the first step, what other capabilities do enterprises
need? As outlined above, customers are demanding the ability to analyze email
information and derive intelligence from it while respecting privacy and
security. This capability is what the industry is beginning to define as “Email
Intelligence.”
EMAIL INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITIES
Clearwell’s definition, as validated by our customers, is that a true Email
Intelligence solution must provide the following six key capabilities:
Federated View into all Email Repositories: Most companies that have
implemented an archive don’t have all of their emails in the archive.
Historical data continues to remain on information stores and exchange
servers, and most companies only archive emails from select groups.
Therefore, a robust Email Intelligence solution must integrate with and
provide a single interface to all email data sources—Exchange Servers, PST
files, Journaling Servers and Archives.
Discussion Threads: Once a troublesome email is found, enterprises often
struggle to identify all the participants who may have been involved in the
discussion, who knew what and when. An effective Email Intelligence solution
must dynamically link all related messages together into threads and provide
a chronological thread of the entire discussion, including all replies and
forwards.

Email Relevance Ranking: Keyword searches return tens of thousands of
irrelevant results, resulting in wasted time and cost. Much like Google,
which analyzes the unique properties of the Internet to display the most
relevant Web pages first, an Email Intelligence solution must analyze the
unique properties of email and apply email-specific algorithms to display
the most relevant emails first. Just like you would never search the
Internet without page rank, why would you settle for searching email without
email relevance rank?
Dashboards and Analytics: An Email Intelligence solution must go beyond
search and retrieval, and extract intelligence from emails and attachments
using sophisticated algorithms. It must deliver a scalable data mart which
can be used to analyze trends via powerful dashboards with drill-down
capabilities. It must proactively identify and notify issues in violation of
company and industry policies. Furthermore, it must provide these
capabilities while respecting privacy and security.
Scalability: An effective Email Intelligence solution must provide a
scalable architecture that can handle an enterprise’s entire email corpus
across all email data stores. It must handle terabytes of email and process
millions of new emails everyday.
Ease of Use and Ease of Deployment: Corporate email systems are the
backbone of a company’s operations. An Email Intelligence solution must
not impact email systems, it must not sit in line and interrupt the flow of
email. It must be easy to deploy and be up and running within minutes. The
interface should be simple, intuitive and achieve rapid user adoption with
minimal training. Lastly, the product needs to be easy to maintain and
operate, providing a very low total cost of ownership to the enterprise.
Designed as a complement to current archiving solutions, Clearwell is easy to
use, install and maintain delivering an immediate ROI and lowest total cost of
ownership to the enterprise.
Several key differentiators set it apart:
- the single view it provides into all email repositories
- the sophistication of its analytics—discussion threads, email relevance
rank and dashboards
- the massive scalability of its platform
- ease of use, deployment and maintenance
Unlike current solutions that simply index and provide search capabilities,
the Clearwell Email Intelligence Platform™ offers a deeper level of
intelligence. By analyzing the unique properties of email (such as recipients,
replies, forwards, CC’s, subject header, etc.), and combining it with
organizational data, Clearwell dynamically derives email-specific communications
patterns. The company then applies its proprietary, patent-pending linguistic
and statistical analysis algorithms, known as Dynamic Content Analysis™ to
extract intelligence from emails and attachments.
Clearwell delivers the power of Email Intelligence without being in the path
of email, without creating a separate information store, without moving
mailboxes and without installing any software on desktops or servers, making it
very easy for an organization’s IT group to deploy and maintain.
Large energy companies, major financial institutions, leading high-technology
companies, and global consulting firms—have realized immediate and significant
value within days of their production deployments. Some of these benefits
include:
- Email analysis in minutes vs. days—up to 90% reduction in costs to
organize and analyze emails for regulatory audit and legal discovery
- Early case assessments performed 80% faster
- Reduced corporate risks from proactive identification and analysis of
critical issues
- Significant improvement in field productivity and reduction in response
times to address critical field issues
- Rapid user adoption, lowest total cost of ownership
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