Speech software meets enterprise security on this new twist on a trendy topic.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 13, 2007]

When we wrote about ArcMail's e-mail archiving product a little over a month ago, We Asked for More. The ArcMail product is designed for the enterprise market, not the service provider market, and lacks some features that would make it easy to resell.

We got a call from Roger Matus, CEO of Concord, Mass.-based InBoxer. The company's Anti-Risk Appliance is modular, allowing service providers to add storage or processing power as needed. It, too, does not have a large number of service provider customers.

"This is a cross-industry product," said Matus. "We have customers in insurance, real estate, transport wholesale, and regional health providers."

The company was founded in 2003. "It was founded in my living room," explained Matus. "The joke here in New England is that it would have been founded in my garage, but it's too cold there."

The company's roots are with speech recognition software developer Dragon Systems, now part of Nuance. Co-founder Sean True, now chief technologist at InBoxer, developed key technology for Dragon Systems, an engine to analyze language use.

"There are two problems that speech recognition needs to solve," Matus said. "First, it needs to figure out what sound a person is making. Then, it needs to decide what word that sound is. For example, in sentence, 'Mr. Wright will write a message right now,' which 'right' is 'right'? We don't have a laundry list of dirty words; we analyze entire messages."

The company was founded in 2003, but emerged in 2005 with a flashy website, Enron Emails, which allowed visitors to search several hundred thousand topical e-mails.

In April / May of 2006, the new proposed rules of civil procedure (FRCP) were released. A key provision now known as "digital discovery" allows attorneys to demand the production of electronic records, including e-mails. "We figured out this was going to be big for us," said Matus. "We retooled the product to be in compliance."

How much storage do you need?
Matus advocates the purchase of an upgradeable appliance, because needs change, especially if a company grows. "When people call and say, 'my lawyer says I need to buy five years' worth of storage,' I ask, 'how many employees will you have five years from now, how big will the average e-mail be, and will you acquire another company in those five years. Of course, nobody knows the answers to these questions. So why buy 12 TB of storage today when in a year, storage will be roughly half the price of what it is today."

The response is a box that can access storage and even processing power not directly attached to it. "We're selling the world's first virtual appliance for archiving, discovery, and content monitoring," said Matus. "Instead of directly accessing a disk drive, the request goes to the virtualization software and then that software goes out and talks to the disk drive. By putting a layer of software between us and the box, the service provider can utilize the customer's hardware and update as needed. We tell people to buy one year's worth of storage now and buy next year's storage next year. The life expectancy of a hard drive is three years. Buy 500 GB of storage now and buy another 500 GB of storage next year, and the software will tell the box that it now has a 1 TB drive."

But hard disks aren't all you'll need to upgrade. "Another dirty little secret in the archiving and discovery world," said Matus, "is that by the time you have 5 TB or 6 TB worth of data, the processor and RAM you buy today won't be enough. If processing power is still doubling every 18 months, then in four and a half years you'll have eight times the power of today (doubling three times). With a virtual appliance, you can add memory and CPU power when you need it."

Want to segment your customers, prevent them from seeing each others' data? You need to be able to. "We allow you to have multiple appliances running on the same hardware, each appliance totally isolated," said Matus. Of course, each appliance would need at least one CPU core.

It's a service
So how should the ISP charge for this? "I recommending charging per mailbox per month," said Matus. "Our system will count the number of e-mail senders for you. You could, if you wanted to, charge by amount of storage used, too. Our virtual appliance will tell you. We have not integrated it with billing software, but if that's your only problem, we can fix it."

In the future, Matus said he is working on more kinds of language analysis, such as identifying a customer complaint, identifying a threat, identifying praise. "We're doing work to take the language capability we have and expand on it."

The company also wants to do more in the hot area of protecting company's confidential information.

Pricing and availability
The InBoxer Anti-Risk Appliance is available now. It is available to ISPs for a revenue share: 35 percent of gross revenues.

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