Sonian Archives E-Mail, Data In The Cloud
Company:
Headquarters: Needham, Mass.
Technology Sector: Services
Key Product: Sonian
Year Founded: 2007
Number of Channel Partners: 20 partners globally
Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket- focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Sonian offers VARs two ways to break into cloud-based e-mail archiving for compliance and eDiscovery.
The Lowdown: Sonian is going into 2010 bent on building out its stable of solution providers.
"Channel development is a big focus of ours in 2010," said Greg Arnette, CEO for the e-mail archiving vendor, adding that Sonian wants to kick-start its program and bulk up beyond the 20 global partners it currently boasts.
At its core, Sonian offers a cloud-based hosted e-mail archiving and eDiscovery service for organizations of all sizes. It integrates with the majority of mail systems to offer a secure, compliant and cost-effective archive and discovery service without the need to deploy software and hardware. Sonian supports messaging servers including Exchange, GroupWise, Notes, IMail Server, Zimbra and Scalix.
And for VARs, Sonian has two ways they can attack the hungry market.
According to Arnette, Sonian has a white-label partner program that lets VARs build and sell a bigger solution around Sonian's hosted archiving solution. Sonian also has a traditional reseller program where a VAR sells the solution.
While Sonian is making its name with e-mail archiving, Arnette said, Sonian can do SaaS archiving of all applications and places where employees generate content, whether it be e-mail, instant messaging or another communication platform.
"Our mantra is: Follow the data," he said.
Sonian's approach works like this: An IT decision-maker with an on-premise e-mail system selects Sonian and logs into a Web application to allow Sonian to collect its data. Sonian can collect the data in a pull fashion similar to how a BlackBerry receives e-mails, or an IT manager can stream the data to Sonian. Once the data is collected it's indexed and text is extracted and encrypted and stored in the cloud. The data is searchable at all times.
Arnette said Sonian fills a gap in the channel where there hasn't yet been a strong channel-focused archiving solution available. It adds another tool for solution providers to round out their feature set.
"If you're offering a full-service feature set, the best place to do that is in the cloud," Arnette said.