Features - Storage Innovations:

VERITY SERVICE CAN REDUCE DATA STORAGE, MANAGEMENT COSTS

Global enterprises can now reduce data storage and management costs significantly by taking advantage of the Verity Data Discovery Program, a new professional services offering from Verity Inc, a leading provider of enterprise software that helps organizations maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment.

Organizations typically implement one or more of three solutions, including portals, content management systems and/or packaged business applications. The Verity Data Discovery Program aims to give enterprises an analysis of the data that are contained in these systems, increasing the access to the information in a cost-effective manner.

"To cope with the huge amount of information that resides in relational databases, business applications and file systems across an organization, it is necessary to identify and understand the type of data in each system," said Anthony J. Bettencourt, Verity's president and CEO. "More importantly, it's crucial to eliminate any duplicated and outdated information from those systems. With the new Verity Data Discovery Program, large-scale organizations will be able to make better use of their intellectual capital as well as realize meaningful cost-savings."

In addition, the Data Discovery Program combined with Verity's K2 Enterprise Thematic Mapping capability can enhance content organization by allowing companies to map data to company-specific taxonomies. This particular part of the process frequently discovers unknown information assets. The program also aims to organize customer's data into pre-structured industry-standard taxonomies, as well as recommend a taxonomy structure for those organizations that have not implemented a corporate-wide taxonomy.

"Search 'silos' have become a serious drag on the productivity of professionals who work with information every day," said Hadley Reynolds, research director at Delphi Group, an independent business advisory and research firm. "When we reach the point at which our e-mail, our collaboration software, our content repositories, our enterprise application programs, our corporate portals and our Web search tools all incorporate different search technologies, we see first hand dramatically diminishing returns on time. The first step out of this quagmire is to evaluate what professionals need to search and the information in the organization; then begin to structure a strategy to build an information intelligence framework that can mitigate the problems. In the new Data Discovery Program, Verity is offering field-tested services and technology to expose these problems and suggest directions to move forward."

Result: Significant Return-On-Investment

Data duplication is often created by users who have experienced difficulty finding information on the portal, leading them to store documents within their own hard drives and resulting in increased data duplication and storage of what becomes outdated information. According to Verity, it is likely that as much as 15 percent of the data stored within a 50-terabyte system may be duplicated. Verity Professional Services has also found that the management of one gigabyte of information can cost as much as $100 per gigabyte per month, so data duplication becomes a consequential expense quickly. In addition, it slows information retrieval and analysis, and frustrates users.

As a result of the elimination of such duplication, several Verity customers have realized a significant return-on-investment of hundreds and thousands of dollars in annual cost savings associated with reduce in data storage and management.

The Verity Data Discovery Program can help to identify and eliminate outdated files in content repositories, which enables users to locate information more rapidly and accurately. This allows users more time to use the relevant information, increasing their productivity.

Five-Step Methodology

Verity's Professional Services will work with an organization's internal team, from technical staff to end-users, in conducting the Verity Data Discovery Program, a proven five-step methodology, including:

• Identify information assets and requirements
• Discover information assets
• Map information to company-specific taxonomies
• Prioritize information sources
• Connect people to the right information.

The fifth and final step of the program is aimed at permitting the members of an organization to identify and gain faster access to domain experts as well as other intellectual assets. With dynamic content, the program aims to provide a life cycle analysis of the intellectual content in the system.