Staying afloat in the flood of e-mail

Stephen Spence is president and co-founder of NorthSeas Advanced Messaging Technology: 'When you've got huge volumes (of e-mail), but (can't) delete anything -- that's where we come in.'

The tentacles attached to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 by the United States Congress -- tough, new corporate compliance legislation in the wake of high-profile business collapses -- have had a direct impact on at least one Ottawa start-up.

Technology developed and promoted by NorthSeas AMT of Ottawa is based on the requirement that some firms are now required to hang on to their e-mails indefinitely.

"We're saying, 'don't worry about your users deleting messages that you may need to present in court because we'll archive everything for you," says its president and sole working co-founder, Stephen Spence.

Moreover, "the cost of being non-compliant is much higher than the cost of one gigabyte of storage," he adds.

Another contemporary problem NorthSeas AMT is attempting to address, Spence explains, is that "it takes, on average, six hours to back up an e-mail server. Most organizations back them up every day, but where are you going to find six hours to go without e-mail? When you've got huge volumes, but (can't) delete anything -- that's where we come in."

Spence, a graduate of Queen's University in Kingston, brought nearly a quarter century of corporate sales and marketing experience to NorthSeas from well-known organizations such as Xerox Corporation, Siemens-Nixdorf Canada and Choreo Systems Inc. Between 1996 and 2002, Spence also headed up sales and marketing for a couple of local IT consulting firms.

In early 2003, he joined Carp-based StorageQuest Inc. as vice-president of sales and marketing. That not only gave him exposure to the emerging market of e-mail archiving, but also sparked an idea.

Not only did the field interest him immensely, he also recognized its contemporary importance, given the enhanced need to archive information as a result of legislation designed to prevent corporate malfeasance. Furthermore, it represented a potential entrepreneurial niche, which Spence seized.

NorthSeas AMT was established in September 2003. Its name is partly an acronym; the syllable ''seas'' stands for ''specialists in e-mail archiving and storage,'' prefaced by ''north,'' which highlights the company's Canadian heritage, particularly to a target audience largely based in the U.S.

The company immediately set to work addressing the needs of companies torn by two conflicting e-mail messaging demands. The first involves sheer volume, with many managers and employees getting up to 150 messages a day. "That's putting a great strain on not only users, but the IT staff that needs to support this e-mail infrastructure, so there's the need to provide better e-mail management tools," Spence explains.

The other is the need for market compliance, with companies -- particularly those that are publicly traded -- having to become more accountable to their shareholders, in part by retaining and being able to access its historical, voluminous e-mail.

To market the fledgling company, NorthSeas' executives met with leading analysts in both the e-mail messaging and storage worlds -- areas they believe have traditionally operated independently of one another, but that now need to operate more in unison.

It also took a while to settle on a particular niche. For instance, recalls Spence, "in the early days, we decided that we wanted to focus on e-mail archiving. We were seriously considering reselling others' technology in order to make a stand in the industry, but very quickly after starting, our own product began to formulate on the drawing board."

One of the fledgling company's first tasks was to sign a multi-year exclusive technology agreement with Ubitech Systems Inc., an Ottawa-based firm involved in the design, manufacture and marketing of mission-critical computer-based messaging-system technology to the civil-aviation field and other industries. Ubitech's founder, Ramesh Misra, became chief technology officer of NorthSeas.

A trial-and-error period still ensued, however, in spite of those developments. One learning experience involved the lack of uniformity of incoming e-mail messages, which created a challenge in terms of making sure all the information in the message, plus attachments, were received in the correct format.

Another problem they had "was to figure how to map a message coming in. Once we were able to do that, we'd have a map that could be created into a database," says Misra.

The company's e-mail archiving appliance, NorthSeas Guard E/N, is partly a play on words: The E/N stands for "enterprise networks." Its technology works like this: When an e-mail message is received, it is archived and stored -- without alteration -- as a file. A map is created stating where the major components of that message are physically located, and then that map, along with header information, is stored in the database record. Users have the capability to view only those aspects of the message they want to see without actually having to retrieve it.

"What's unique about our product is ... how we capture and retrieve messages," Spence says.

As a hardware device located outside the mail servers, rather than a software package inside the server itself, as many competitors offer, NorthSeas Guard E/N is also unique from a physical standpoint. "It's a box, which you connect to the front of your public network. And that's it. You really don't have to do anything else. It's an appliance solution," Misra says.

Furthermore, he adds, it is a very independent system that is compatible with whatever mail-server applications clients are using, such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange or Unix Mail. "All we're doing is taking your e-mails, archiving them, and then providing you with the solution to retrieve it when you want."

The NorthSeas Guard E/N appliance was publicly released at the end of October, with its first sale taking place immediately thereafter.

Its search features permit users to retrieve a message and any attachments from the archive. These are then redelivered to the user's inbox as an e-mail attachment, allowing the original message to remain untouched, ensuring the privacy of archived e-mail such that a user can only see, retrieve and preview his or her own e-mail.

It also ensures compliance in case the message is ever required in court. Otherwise, somebody who, for example, sends a message and then decides to delete it might succeed if they immediately eliminate it from the server before the back-up cycle takes place, Spence explains.

"Our process is such that as soon as a message comes into an organization -- even before it gets to the mail server -- our device intercepts it, makes a copy and sends it over to the archives, then sends it off to the mail server. By the time the mail servers use it, we've already archived it," he says, pointing out that Guard E/N not only supplements the normal back-up process, it can also replace it.

That, says Spence, "is a huge advantage," especially when it can take six hours to back up a mail server.

NorthSeas AMT, with its 10 employees, has established the U.S. as its primary target market. The company has resellers in Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Houston and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

NorthSeas' alliance with Ubitech brings a number of synergies to the table. Its technology helps Ubitech service the civil-aviation industry by, for instance, providing pilots with an enhanced capability to file flight plans via e-mail. In turn, NorthSeas has exclusive access to Ubitech's switching and archiving technology for all but the civil-aviation field.

More recently, in June 2004, a partnership was forged with Espion Inc. of Baton Rouge, for co-operation in terms of marketing and development for combined e-mail security archiving appliance solutions. Espion has developed advanced technology that allows users to assign a score to incoming e-mail with which to root out unwanted messages.

The combined suite will involve filtering of spam, virus checking, and improved e-mail management and archiving. Espion will merge NorthSeas' product with its sales channel. NorthSeas will, in turn, incorporate Espion's technology into its appliance and expand into e-mail security.

Spence, who is a coach for one of the Ottawa Fury women soccer teams, draws parallels between running his business and coaching soccer.

"One of the things I've noticed is that simplicity is key in both of those areas. Simple is effective, and that's exactly what we're doing here. The other link is passion. If you deliver passion to your players, employees or customers about what you're doing, and you love what you do every day, the message gets adopted so much more readily.

"And it's contagious," he says.

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