IBM Will Acquire StoredIQ, a Company that Manages Corporate Data
IBM Will Acquire StoredIQ, a Company that Manages Corporate Data by UCStrategies Staff
IBMannounced that it is set to acquire StoredIQ, an Austin-based company specializing in managing large caches of corporate data. The 11-year-old StoredIQ will be added to IBM’s Information LifeCycle Governance Suite, which is designed to help companies lower their spending on corporate data they have accumulated over the years.
The usual problem in the Big Data community is the impulse to move data before managing or doing anything useful with it. The StoredIQ approach to the aforementioned situation involves data management in the place where the data is originally stored. StoredIQ’s management style is said to work with a range of data sources, such as desktop machines, file shares, and old tapes. The key is to analyze all of the data, pinpoint the essential bits, and delete the ones that have no importance.
Corporate data accumulates and multiplies – in a bad way. For example, an email chain that comes with email attachments can get sent, re-sent, and forwarded to many people multiple times. Unnecessary copies are created along the way, thus making the tasks of data storage and management all the more difficult. And that’s only for email servers. Multiple copies of other types of data are also being created. Cleaning up the accumulated data is much more practical and realistic than sorting through all of them.
However, as corporate data ages, it can become valuable. Crucial business patterns emerge the longer the data is kept and allowed to accumulate. For instance, seasonal patterns and pricing data are information worth keeping for years. And this is when IBM’s analytics supposedly becomes handy: when a company needs to know which data are worth storing.
Corporate data storage and management problems are not trivial. Although there are numerous new regulations regarding data retention in the past few years, some companies are required by law to store all of their data in case of an enforcement order by a regulatory agency or a lawsuit. And as data accumulates and multiplies, the cost of keeping and managing it also increases, resulting in nuisance for both the general counsel and the CIO of any company.
“CIOs and general counsels are overwhelmed by volumes of information that exceed their budgets and their capacity to meet legal requirements,” said Deidre Paknad, vice president of Information Lifecycle Governance at IBM. “With this acquisition, IBM adds to its unique strengths as a provider able to help CIOs and attorneys rapidly drive out excess information cost and mitigate legal risks while improving information utility for the business.”
“Together, IBM and StoredIQ can empower organizations to more efficiently use and govern their unstructured data to increase its value and eliminate unnecessary cost and risk,” said Phil Myers, CEO of StoredIQ. “IBM and StoredIQ are longstanding partners with existing integration between IBM's Information Lifecycle Governance suite and StoredIQ's active data management software.”
The planned deal to acquire StoredIQ is based on previous IBM acquisitions, such as PSS Systems in 2010 and Vivisimo in early 2012. (KOM) Link