Highlights from Iron Mountain Digital 2.0 Industry Analyst Meeting

Highlights: The overall annual growth in data volumes is beings driven by an increase in unstructured data created by social media and collaboration solutions, mobile solutions and rich media which is leading to much higher costs for information storage and management. This problem is further exasperated as the information creation moves from customer on-premises sources, to now include mobile edge devices and the cloud. SMBs and mid-market enterprises now need to take a much more holistic approach to information management. Driven by the need to support compliance, litigation, business continuity and disaster recovery requirements – SMBs need to carefully consider who they partner with as their trusted guardian of their information considering their need to store, protect, manage and retrieve this information in a virtual world anytime, anywhere, and anyplace.

Quick Take: I’ve been following Iron Mountain for a while, and this was their 3^rd. analyst event that I attended. Everyone recognizes Salesforce.com as a cloud solution market leader; I would venture to say that the 2^nd biggest cloud solution and services provider is Iron Mountain Digital. Key insights from the conference are:

• Shift in company focus from Storage-as-a-Service to ‘Integrated Information Management Solutions‘ that is based on a location agnostic strategy – from on-premise to edge to cloud
  
  
• Key Value Propositions to address the customers Total Cost of Ownership/Total Cost of Management of Information include:
  
  • Help customers reduce their spend and risk in owning / storing their rapidly growing information through policy-based intelligent information storage and access
    
  • Help customers improve operational efficiencies and reduce their spend in managing their information for use
    
  • Trusted partner in information management for both physical and electronic records and information, and in bridging from one to the other in terms of document conversion, data restoration, scanning, etc. 

What makes Iron Mountain different?

• Information management platform with intelligence-driven and policy-enabled applications. This has been enabled through internal development and innovation (Digital Record Center for Compliant Messaging, for example), partnering (Total Email Management Suite, powered by Mimecast), and a carefully crafted acquisition strategy that started with Connected® and LiveVault® for backup to recent acquisitions that include Stratify® for eDiscovery and Mimosa for archiving.
  
• Unique capabilities
  to “look into” and “look across” information. This will help with categorization of data – even at the point of creation – to enable intelligent access, compliance (including risk management), discovery, recovery, destruction and other potential use cases
  
• Trusted partner who is financially strong. There are several companies offering remote backup solutions, and hosted email archiving, including you local VAR. But will these companies be around when you need the information 10-20 years from now for compliance purposes or to support litigation?
   What is still missing? Iron Mountain is accumulating a good war chest for location-agnostic information management solutions. They do have global relationships with large enterprise and upper mid-market companies – developed as the dominant leader in the physical information management services business that includes the storage of paper documents and magnetic tape storage media for backup and archiving purposes. They serve the SMB market through some core services, through direct and indirect channels. However, in my opinion, there is a larger opportunity in the SMB and core mid-market that includes:
  • Backup and archiving to support daily operations for desktops, servers and mobile devices
    
  • Backup and archiving to support business continuity and disaster recovery
    
  • Information management to support risk and compliance management
    
  • Virtualization of servers and desktops, and cloud computing is creating new and unique information creation and management opportunities which need to be addressed. The vendors that address these solutions (on public clouds based solutions) will be in the unique position to provide the services that Iron Mountain Digital 2.0 is seeking to provide. 

The first mover vendors will gain tremendous benefits, as these solution partnerships are now easy to replace – Iron Mountain can attest to this with their decade-long relationships with a large percentage of their customers. Iron Mountain needs to craft an SMB and core mid-market strategy with a more aggressive go-to-market plan than what I see at present.