Tag Archives: Barry Murphy

October 13, 2015 · 8:57 AM

A Series of Firsts: How X1 Sets the Standard for the New Enterprise Search Market

by Barry Murphy

The new world of IT demands that enterprise software support varying infrastructures – traditional managed data centers, the cloud, hybrid and virtual environments.  As a result, old-school approaches that once seemed logical no longer work in today’s reality.  For example, tightly-coupled search appliances that marry hardware and software together no longer meet the requirements of enterprises that need to make distributed workers more productive no matter what kind of device they are on.  It’s a new world for enterprise search and traditional solutions will have a very hard time adapting and scaling.

X1 is ready for the IT reality of always-on, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments and business mobility.  This is evidenced by two “firsts” that X1 is proud to announce.  First, X1 is the first search application with an app publicly available in an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) app store.  X1 Search Mobile is available in the AirWatch marketplace.  Given the rapid move to mobile devices for work, this is no small news.  Google just announced on Friday that searching the web is now predominantly done from mobile phones.

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It’s clear, then, that enterprise search from the mobile device is now an essential requirement for business professionals.  The mobile search app is important, but what X1 is building out is much more than that.  In order to effectively deliver enterprise search from the mobile device requires having the back-end infrastructure to support full enterprise search in virtual environments.  It also requires supporting the next-generation desktop (VDI or DaaS) where the users live. X1 has uniquely mastered such back-end infrastructure with the only desktop search (VDI or otherwise) and enterprise search solution that are VMware Ready certified.

The second “first” that X1 is proud of is the listing of X1 Rapid Discovery in the Amazon AWS Marketplace.  Again, this is no small feat – this is the first enterprise-grade search and eDiscovery application to be available in the AWS Marketplace.

AWS marketplace

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Organizations storing content in AWS can now get full-featured enterprise search and eDiscovery deployed right next to their content.  And, if these organizations store other content locally, they can deploy Rapid Discovery in their own data center as well and have a single-pane-of-glass across all information no matter where it lives.

X1 will continue to provide solutions that work in the infrastructures that organizations utilize today.  The traditional approach to search will not work, but with X1, companies will have the flexibility to deploy into any environment and give users a powerful search experience on any device.  That is a powerful productivity tool – and businesses require worker productivity the same way humans require oxygen.  It is a new enterprise search market out there and X1 is uniquely positioned to lead the charge.

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September 10, 2014 · 8:33 AM

End-User Computing & Search Go Hand-In-Hand

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by Barry Murphy

Last week, John Patzakis here at X1 blogged about the VMworld 2014 event and how it has become the Comdex for enterprise IT.  I was at the show and it was very clear that end-users are the future of IT.  The trend has been talked about for quite some time and is commonly called the consumerization of IT.  The heat around that topic has tended to focus on devices and not as much on what is behind information access on those devices.  But, as BYOD takes off and mobility becomes increasingly important, enterprises care more and more about the flow and availability of information.  Why?  Because easy access to information is critical to the end-user acceptance of enterprise IT offerings; when users cannot quickly find what they are looking for, they reject what IT rolls out to them.  Without that end-user acceptance, there is no chance for a positive ROI on any IT project.

End-user experience is so key that VMware has named a division of its company “End User Computing.”  That EUC unit made several major acquisitions in the last year, including Airwatch and Desktone.  This is because technology providers need to win the battle with end-users.  For an example of a company that built its business on the backs of end-users and leveraged those relationships to bully its way into enterprise IT, look no further than Apple.  As VDI users have learned, it is critical to bake search requirements into virtual desktop deployments from the get-go in order to ensure an optimal user experience.  And, as Brian Katz points out in his blog, the same thing will hold true with mobile – usability will be key.  That is why we at X1 are so excited about the future.  X1’s user interface for search is second to none.  And, users actually rave about it.

In my days as an industry analyst, I rarely had technology users raving about the tools they were using.  And, I never ever had an enterprise search user tell me that their solution solved the challenge of finding information quickly.  The rabid users of X1 have been an eye opener for me.  In fact, an X1 customer recently polled its users and virtually every user said that X1 is easy to learn and use (no easy feat for a piece of enterprise software) and over 70% of users described their experience with X1 as very positive or positive.  Those numbers are unheard of in terms of technology satisfaction.

With what I’ve learned from my days as an analyst and in my time here at X1, I’ve come up with some ways to approach enterprise search in a way that is both IT and user-friendly.  We will share the knowledge in a webinar on October 9 at 1pm ET / 10am PT.  We’ve titled it, “Making Enterprise Search Actually Work by Putting User Experience First.”

In this “no-death-by-PowerPoint” webinar, attendees will not only learn, but actually see how to deploy enterprise search solutions in ways that make both end-users and IT departments happy.  This webinar will demonstrate both why and how to put end-user experience first.   Specifically, attendees will learn:

  • Why the human brain is the best analytical engine for business productivity search
  • How federation can save IT time, money, and headaches
  • How to best deploy search solutions in all IT infrastructures
  • How to achieve ROI on enterprise search in ways never seen in the past
  • That search can be like BASF – it can make many other technology deployments better, including VDI, SharePoint, and Enterprise Vault

I will be presenting on this webinar and will be joined by some special guests to be named later.  Come learn why search and end-user computing go hand-in-hand.

Register for the webinar here >

 

 

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April 16, 2014 · 11:59 AM

Social Discovery Requires An Investigative Platform

by Barry Murphy

Recent cases, such as the one John Patzakis blogged about last week and the case in Michigan where Facebook content led to the arrest of child-beaters, have put social discovery squarely in the spotlight.  While there are those in the industry that still think of social media as being a fringe element in the eDiscovery world, the evidence suggests otherwise.  The fact is that social media content is an integral part of business life.  eDJ Group research from last fall shows that 63% of eDJ’s survey respondents use external social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook for business purposes.

eDJ data on social media usage

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In fact, usage of social media for business is growing and it will soon catch up to (and probably surpass) email.  We all know what happened with discovery of email – the inability to efficiently collect it practically created the eDiscovery industry.  Reinforcing the fact that social discovery has arrived are the sales numbers for X1’s social discovery product – which continue to grow exponentially – and word from service providers that they are doing Facebook collections thirty times per week.  I believe that social discovery is poised to become a big market in and of itself.

The challenge with social media – unlike email – is that much of the data resides outside the walls of an organization.  Collection of social media becomes a challenge.  Companies cannot simply call Facebook or Twitter and request all of the information for various custodians.  It is possible to take screenshots of various web pages or social media sits, but as John’s blog points out, screenshots are not necessarily admissible as evidence.  Plus, screenshots take a technical toll on eDiscovery – they can be difficult to index and may require OCR, which still may not be able to pull text out of the image.  Companies could write API connections to the social media publishers themselves, but that requires a ton of labor to not only build those connectors, but also to manage the almost weekly updates to the publishers’ APIs.  Instead, companies should look for an investigative platform.

A social media investigative platform will include:

  • Tight API connections to the major social media publishers like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.  The API connection allows for the capture of unique metadata that each publisher adds to its data.
  • A web crawler and capture capability that creates a copy of the page to be stored for processing into a preservation repository.
  • The ability to keep data forensically sound. This requires calculating MD5 hash values of individual items upon capture and maintaining those values through export. The platform must keep logs and reports of all actions on data.  It also must be able to use metadata to establish chain of custody and authentication.

One of the points eDJ Group makes in its “Collection of Preservation of Social Media” report is to “[p]lan for more and more social media.  While companies can focus near-term efforts on the major publishers (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), over time there will be more and more sources of social media for companies to govern.  The number of users of other social networks like Google+ and Tumblr continues to increase.  More and more companies share video content via YouTube.  And, just imagine the rich evidence that a site like FourSquare (which allows users to check in with their geographic location) could provide.”  Social discovery is here to stay and the stakes are getting higher.  The time to act and build the capability is now, not a year from now when you are already behind the eight-ball – that will only create the same situation we created by getting behind the curve with email.

Learn more about X1 Social Discovery here >

 

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February 26, 2014 · 1:13 PM

Avoid SharePoint eDiscovery Headaches Before They Begin

by Barry Murphy

Sharepoint no colorLast week, this blog featured highlights from the very successful SharePoint eDiscovery webinar with Reed Smith.  It is a topic that came up time and again in my tenure as an analyst; companies and government Agencies are becoming tightly bound to SharePoint and want to be sure that eDiscovery ordeals can be avoided.

Microsoft SharePoint continues to gain widespread traction in organizations large and small.  A recent Forrester Research survey found that 66% of respondents will deploy SharePoint server in the next 12 months (source: Forrester Research August 2013 Global SharePoint Usage online survey).  The attraction to SharePoint is obvious – the system creates business benefits: enabling collaboration in efficient ways; providing ways to track versions of documents edited by multiple parties; allowing non-technical business people to apply basic workflow to content-driven processes, and providing faster access to information (via search and integration with the MS Office suite of apps).

For the value it creates, SharePoint can cause eDiscovery and information governance headaches if proper planning does not take place.  It is all too easy to assume that if information is searchable, eDiscovery will be no problem when the time comes.  But, as is often the case in life, the devil is in the details.  Because SharePoint allows users to add value to content (e.g. adding workflow tasks), there is the factor of metadata to consider.

In eDiscovery, metadata is a critical component of ESI that can wreak havoc on collection efforts.  When we talk about metadata for native ESI, we are usually concerned about the Operating System (OS) fields that are kept in the File Allocation Table (FAT). Different OS formats support a wide variety of fields such as different dates, attributes, permissions and file name formats (long vs. short). These fields are not usually stored within the actual file and so are very vulnerable to alteration or complete loss when items are read or copied. Forensic collection is focused on preserving this ‘envelope’ information so that evidence can be authenticated and the context reconstructed in court. That is only half of the metadata story. Microsoft Office and other programs retain non-displayed information within the header and body of all common file types, especially with the adoption of the XML based Office 2007 file formats.

This metadata issue is only extended with SharePoint because most collection efforts are focused only on grabbing SharePoint document libraries (as they are stored on file systems).  But SharePoint is so much more than document libraries (if it weren’t, it would simply be another file share sitting out there).

A defensible SharePoint collection solution will be able to capture document libraries, metadata, and truly enable contextual preservation.  When considering a SharePoint collection tool be sure that it:

  • Allows for incremental preservation, monitoring changes, identifying and preserving different document versions, and incrementally preserve to multiple matters over time
  • Maps to custodian access and prevent over-preservation, collecting and preserving only what is relevant to a particular custodian, not the entire SharePoint site
  • Is deployable in the same fashion as SharePoint, which tends to be highly decentralized and siloed; thus the collection solution should be deployable on-demand, directly to SharePoint sites through a highly automated, remote installation, with intuitive administration and operation performed through a standard web browser

At the end of the day, informed customers will make sure that the collection tool can get more than just SharePoint document libraries, but all metadata, as well.  Also, look for solutions that will not impact the production environment too heavily; you don’t want to bring SharePoint to its knees when it is a valuable business application.  And finally, get legal and IT together on the same page about how to reasonably prove that your SharePoint preservation and collection methodologies and tools are defensible.

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February 18, 2014 · 6:24 AM

Barry Murphy Joins the X1 Team

Last week, I said goodbye to my time at the eDJ Group, a company in good hands that will continue to provide top notch eDiscovery and information governance consulting at a level of depth very few can match.   This week begins my new adventure as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategy at X1, and I am very excited about the opportunity.

Many have asked why I chose to join X1 and I want to take this space today to explain the reasons.  As an analyst for the past four years, I have had the chance to see – up close and personal – the challenges that enterprise IT and business people are trying to address.  One that comes up consistently is the ability to quickly find information in a world where the volume of it is increasing so rapidly.  While search might seem relatively simple, I can tell you that many clients pull their hairs out due to frustration with enterprise search deployments.

Thus, the first thing that hit me about X1 was the number of X1 customers whose top point to make about that product is that “it just works.”  Business people like the ease of use and clean, single-pane-of glass view of their information, Legal teams like how X1 Rapid Discovery makes eDiscovery more efficient and less costly, and IT teams like that the product can be deployed in increasingly virtualized environments.

Part of the attraction to X1, for me, is the fact that the company can address such a range of solutions via a powerful search engine.  It is not just about eDiscovery, though there is a product for that.  Rather, X1 will power many solutions by providing easy access to information – and the company does it in a way that just works.  It makes me think back to those old BASF commercials – the ones where BASF says, “we don’t make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better.”  I get a feeling that same message can apply at X1; something along the lines of “we don’t make the cloud infrastructure, we make the cloud infrastructure better and more valuable.”

Stay tuned for more details on how X1 will make other solutions better and continue to provide great search products in 2014.  I’m looking forward to this adventure.

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