Sherpa Takes Legacy E-mail Data To Cloud Services

Sherpa, a developer of e-mail management, eDiscovery, and e-mail archiving software, is working with partners LiveOffice and Mimecast to make it possible for their users to make legacy data available through their services right customers start working with them, said Rick Wilson, senior product manager of the Pittsburgh-based company.

The problem with adopting cloud-based applications is that they work well on data generated after the customer signs up for the service, but bringing in legacy data can be a lot of work, Wilson said.

"Hosted service providers do a great job from Day One forward," he said. "But the hose is in the legacy data on customers' hard drives. There's not good way to get that data from the desktop. We provide a way to take legacy data and add it to the hosted solution."

Wilson said many vendors have tools to migrate the data fairly quickly if it as either centralized on a server or sent via a USB hard drive. However, most customers also have their data scattered on multiple servers and desktops.

"The cloud providers are not so sophisticated as to be able to go to multiple desktops to collect data," he said. "And that function is not a revenue generator for them."

Sherpa's software automatically locates personal folders and PST files in a distributed computing environment, and makes the legacy e-mail data from those sources available to move to a centralized cloud repository, Wilson said.

The goal is to get that legacy e-mail data to the cloud as quickly as possible to protect it from being lost, he said.

Sherpa already has a reseller agreement with Mimecast, a Waltham, Mass.-based developer of unified e-mail management technology.

The company is also providing professional services to LiveOffice, a Torrance, Calif.-based provider of cloud-based e-mail archiving, e-mail compliance, e-mail discovery, and mailbox management.

Other similar partnerships with cloud-based e-mail service providers are in progress, said Eric Ortosky, Sherpa's director of channel sales.