GWAVA Press Releases

Exciting Announcements at GWAVACon

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:57:00 -0500

We just finished up our 17th GWAVACon event in Torrance, CA this past week. As always it was a first class event with great sessions, training and keynotes. There are many great things that happened during the conference but I want to focus on two important highlights. First, I was extremely impressed with the level of engagement of the Novell team. The focus on the customer and emphasis on GroupWise and Vibe is more than just words and will pay off for the millions of users of GroupWise in the years to come in greater features and better quality delivered in a very agile and quick manner. The launch of GroupWise 2012 was very well done and our customers enjoyed spending an evening on the Queen Mary celebrating the great accomplishment of the Novell team in their latest release.

Secondly, GWAVA has been very busy delivering continual value to our customers via upgrades to existing products, new products, and new delivery choices. We announced the imminent release of GWAVA 6, our flagship email security and anti-spam product for both Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange. GWAVA 6 delivers new capabilities in the areas of SMTP functionality, multi-tenancy and cloud technologies and image analysis technology that prevents unwanted images out of your company. We also announced a brand-new product called "Blueprint for Reload". Blueprint for Reload is a separate product that "snaps" into our Reload product. It gives customers amazing reporting capabilities to better understand the storage usage of their GroupWise system and enable our customers to optimize their infrastructure and make better informed decisions in their planing to add other features, such as archiving. And lastly, we announced GWAVA Cloud Services. GWAVA Cloud Services offers Cloud based email security and archiving for most major email platforms as well as disaster recovery and backup services for GroupWise customers. This enables customers to reduce their costs and management overhead of their email infrastructure and leave it to the experts at GWAVA to manage for them.

More details on GWAVA's latest announcements can be found at http://www.gwava.com. Additionally, we are running a special promotion until May 1st for GWAVA Cloud Services. Customers who sign up for 12 months of service will receive 3 months for free. Please visit http://www.gwava.com/cloud for details on our cloud service, features and pricing.

Archiving: Gran Oportunidad

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:10:00 -0400

Mirando en restrospectiva eventos como el Blackberry World 2011, el Microsoft World Partner Conference, y el Novell BrainShare 2011 donde a través de un papel no menor (Gold Sponsors y Cornerstone Sponsor en los dos últimos), tuvimos la posibilidad de validar nuestra oferta frente a las necesidades del mercado, la competencia, y las oportunidades que nos ofrece como proveedores tecnológicos y socios de negocios. Quiero compartir con ustedes los siguientes puntos que destacan aspectos que fundamentan el desarrollo de GWAVA en la región. -especialmente dirigidos a potenciales clientes y socios de negocios interesados en entender el valor de GWAVA como proveedor de soluciones en el ámbito de seguridad y compliance-.

Un mercado en expansión: Estudios indican que para el 2013 el mercado global del archiving superara los U$1.1Billones. Con indices de crecimiento anual superior al 21%
Necesidades sentidas y expresas por clientes en toda la región Latino Américana: Llamemoslo “Transparencia de Gobierno”, Regulaciones Financieras, Requerimientos de Multinacionales en cuanto al manejo de información, o simplemente políticas de retención y auditoria. La necesidad de gerenciar las comunicaciones de funcionarios y empleados ha dejado de ser algo deseable a ser algo requerido.
Las ofertas de movilidad en cuanto dispositivos y aplicaciones que han desplazado el centro de la mensajería electrónica del correo, a un entorno más complejo donde confluyen la mensajería instantánea -escritorio y móviles- con las redes sociales. La utilización de estas tecnologías en función de la productividad de las personas demanda control reforzando la necesidad expresa en el enunciado anterior.
El creciente tráfico y requerimientos de almacenamiento debido a los tipos y tamaños de anexos, y a la confluencia de diversas aplicaciones en el correo -notificaciones de procesos- requieren que los sistemas de correo tengan alternativas de mantener la información disponible a los usuarios mientras garantizan el rendimiento y confiabilidad de un servicio CRITICO.

Conociendo bien nuestra región, observando la tendencia en norte América, analizando las necesidades de los clientes, la validación de las mismas en entornos totalmente diferentes -carriers, canal de distribución, Instituciones-, no puedo más que coincidir en que el Archiving es la tercera gran “ola” en seguridad para las comunicaciones electrónicas.

Venimos de una generación a comienzos de los 2000 donde los antivirus florecieron, de ahí, pasamos rápidamente a mediados de la década a combinarlo con capacidades AntiSpam. Ahora, comenzando el decenio la popularización del Archiving marcará la tercera esta mencionada tercera ola.

GWAVA preparado para capitalizar esta oportunidad. No pretendo hacer de éste blog una pieza comercial, por ello los invito a ver los videos y material de apoyo de las tecnologías en nuestro web. Sin embargo, me interesa rescatar ciertos aspectos: 1- Nuestro alcance a dispositivos móviles, y redes sociales además de los tradicionales Exchange y GroupWise. 2- Nuestra flexibilidad tecnológica a nivel de plataformas, y en arquitectura de única estancia de almacenamiento para toda la información en el archiving. 3- Nuestros 10 años en el mercado y el haber navegado las dos primeras olas. 4- Nuestros clientes a nivel región. 5- Nuestros socios de negocios tecnológicos Microsoft, Novell, RIM.

Nuestro esfuerzo en los siguientes meses estará destinado a proveer a nuestros socios de negocios las herramientas necesarias para hacer la diferencia en sus clientes. Generando valor a los mismos, y rentabilidad y confianza a nuestros representantes en cada mercado. Esperamos oír de ustedes en éste fin de año.

E-Discovery and Data Retention for the Non Party

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:54:00 -0400

It has now become generally known that any corporation or entity may, in the course of litigation, be required to respond to discovery demands for electronically stored data. What is less clear is to what extent, if any, a business or organization may be required to produce such data in the context of litigation between others to which it is not a party but may have in its custody data that a court considers potentially relevant to the matter before it.

In such an instance, the entity in question will not have the advantage of retaining the data pursuant to its litigation hold policies and thus it might well be deleted as part of its routine deletion cycle.

The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court has recently addressed this issue in the matter of Tener,M.D. v. Cremer, M.D. et al, 2011 NY Slip Op. 06543, N.Y.App. Div. September 22, 2011)

Here, the plaintiff in defamation proceedings against a website, sought data from NYU concerning the identity of all persons who had used one of its computers to access the internet via a particular I.P. address on a given day.

The University took the position that this data appears as a text file that is automatically over written every 30 days.

The plaintiff however, made proof that, in fact, such data although over written can, with expertise and available software be retrieved.

While the trial court sided with the University, the Appellate Division made a number of determinations that must be kept in mind by any entity that operates through the use of electronically stored data.

First, the court held that while deletion makes the retrieval of data more difficult it does not, of itself, lead to a conclusion that such data is irretrievable

Secondly, it cited the non-binding but persuasive Federal Rule 45(d)(1)(D) which provides that a nonparty,

“Need not provide discovery of electronically stored information that the person identifies as not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost”.

However the Federal Rules of Procedure accord the courts the authority to order production of such data upon a demonstration of “good cause” and subject to the limitations of section 26 which include a consideration of the burden and expense of production when weighed against its likely benefit ion terms of relevance.

Based upon this consideration, the Appellate Division remanded the case to the court below to determine whether, having regard to the relevance of the data, the University should be ordered, notwithstanding the cost, to retrieve it.

The court also added that, apart from the relevance factors, allowing entities to escape the discovery obligation altogether would encourage them to implement policies of rapid deletion in order to insulate themselves from the issue altogether.

Litigation Hold: What did the Defendant Know and When did he Know it?

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:39:00 -0400

One of the least precise but, often, the most important considerations associated with data retention is when routine data retention and destruction policies are superseded by a legal obligation to preserve potential evidence.

This, quite obviously, pre-dates service of legal proceedings and we now find that the courts are setting forth guidelines to be considered in instances where data custodians are aware of a dispute.

The general rule has been established as one of “reasonable anticipation” of litigation. Silvestri v. GMC, 271 F 3d 583, 591 (4^th Cir 2001): Pension Committee of the Univ of Montreal Pension Plan v Bank of America Securities LLC 685 F.Supp 2d 456, 466 (SDNY).

It is important however to note that this standard is not subjective as in, did this Defendant reasonably foresee litigation, but is rather objective and the test will be whether a reasonable party in the same factual context would have reasonably foreseen that litigation would develop. Micron Tech Inc v. Rambus Inc 09-1263, 2011 WL 1815975 (Fed. Cir May 13, 2011).

The proper application of this rule is of vital importance since this forms the basis of the legal obligation to suspend all routine policies concerning retention and to preserve all data that might conceivably be deemed relevant to the dispute by a competent tribunal.

What is less clear however is what a court will consider in determining what the conclusions of a reasonable party would be.

In the organizational context, the prevailing view is that there must be a reasonable anticipation of litigation by more than one or two employees in order for the duty to preserve to be engaged Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC F.R.D. 212, 217 (SDNY 2003)

Similarly in Toussie v County of Suffolk 01-6716,2007 U.S>Dist. LEXIS 93988 (E.D.N.Y. Dec 21 2007), the court held that there was no duty to preserve given that “a handful” of employees expected the proceedings and that no evidence had been made that any substantial number of “key personnel” anticipated the litigation.

That litigation may be on the way must be more than a “vague” statement and the simple existence of a dispute will not constitute reasonable anticipation Goodman v. Praxair services 632 F.Supp 2d 494.510 ( D. Md 2009).

In light of this, a letter advising of plaintiff’s trade mark rights and that its purpose was to determine if litigation could be “avoided” was deemed not to be sufficient to trigger the duty to preserve Cache La Pourdre Feeds LLC v. Land O lakes Farmland Feed LLC 244 F.R.D. 614, 622 (D.Colo 2007).

The current situation appears to be that a number of factors must be taken into account in determining if one is in the presence of a reasonable anticipation of litigation thereby triggering litigation hold. This involves, the clarity of the threat as well as who in the receiving party’s organization is aware of both the threat and the context in which it is made.

Certainly, organizations would be well advised to have in place fixed policies concerning intra-organizational communication and evaluation of letters from attorneys or communications in which some threat, even a vague or opaque one of legal action may be contained.

E-Discovery and the Cloud: Some Issues to Consider

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:11:00 -0400

The relatively recent trend of business to outsource it’s data management offsite has plainly given rise to a wide range of concerns as to how previously locally stored information, its security and retrieval are being impacted by the cloud.

Not to be forgotten in these considerations is how the interposition of a third party between a potential litigant and its data may effect it’s obligations with respect to E-Discovery.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, assume- and require- that litigants are able to describe and produce in physical or electronic form, all documents which are, or are required to be, in their possession, custody or under their control. and to produce them in their entirety and in their original form without modification of any kind

The mere fact that such documents are no longer in a filing cabinet on the premises neither of a litigant nor, in the case of cloud computing even contained on a hard drive or server which is locally accessible points out the potential complications that may develop at the discovery stage of the litigation process.

It would be very wise for anyone who may potentially be a party to litigation to carefully work through their contractual arrangement with off site storage providers to make certain that the provider is willing and able to make exceptions to some routine maintenance that can overwrite or even delete some stored data which may be pooled with that of literally hundreds of thousands of other users

It is of extreme importance that users, and in particular their counsel be aware of the precise terms and conditions of how data is being stored and of what may be done to it during storage.

Whatever its various strengths, cloud computing represents a significant factor of uncertainty to those who may be called upon in the context of litigation to recall from storage and produce documents whose relevance will not be discernable for years.

Litigants, in the terms expressed by the Court in Cartel asset Management v Ocwen Financial Corp No.01-CV-01644-RED-CBS at 25 (D.Co 8 Feb 2010) must be “candid, co-operative and transparent” in responding to E-Discovery Orders and the courts have not yet created any safe harbors for those acting in good faith who fail to respond as they would have thirty years ago when such Orders were limited to hard copies of documents

Die naechste Speichergeneration – Winzige Rechengenies

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:46:00 -0400

Ich kann mich noch entsinnen, als ich meinen ersten PC gekauft habe. Das war im Jahr 1987, seinerzeit hatte ich mir einen IBM PC XT zugelegt (schon mit Festplatte!). Allerdings habe ich innerhalb von 12 Monaten zwei, Updates“ durchgefuehrt und mir jeweils einen 80286 und 80386 zugelegt. Der Grund hierfuer war einfach – ich bekam immer wieder irgendwelche tollen Softwareloesungen gezeigt, die aber nicht auf dem XT oder 80286 funktionierten. Seitdem habe ich so ziemliche jede Rechnergeneration mitgemacht. Heute arbeite ich vorwiegend mit meinem MacBook Pro, habe aber sowohl in der Firma als auch zuhause noch jeweils eine Windows-Workstation stehen. Diese werde ich sicherlich beizeiten durch iMacs ersetzen.

Keine Angst, dieses wird kein „Loblied“ auf Apple. UEber ein iPod touch bin ich mehr oder minder zu Apple gekommen, die Anwenderfreundlichkeit steht bei Apple viel staerker im Vordergrund als bei Microsoft. Das hat mich „verleitet“ ein Apple MacBook pro zu kaufen – die Entscheidung habe ich nie bereut. Die Entwicklungen der juengeren Vergangenheit haben es mir einfach gemacht, da viele Programme ueber Webclient oder grundsaetzlich in der Cloud verfuegbar sind und keine Windows-Fat-Clients mehr benoetigen.

Um auf das eigentliche Thema zu kommen, ich habe am vergangenen Sonntag einen sehr interessanten Beitrag in meiner Sonntagszeitung gelesen (Welt am Sonntag – teilweise folgen hier kurze „Zitate“ daraus, insofern ist eine Plagiatsueberpruefung durch wen auch immer nicht mehr notwendig). Dort wurde die naechste Generation von Speichern vorgestellt, die Memristoren. Aber eins nach dem anderen……

Vor 40 Jahren passten auf den Ur-Chip 4004 von Intel 2.300 Transistoren. Heute befinden sich auf einem Chip mehr als zwei Milliarden (2.000.000.000) elektronische Komponenten. Wenn man die damaligen Preise einfach mal in die heutige Zeit beamen wuerde, dann muesste ein MP3 Player heute fast 3 Milliarden (3.000.000.000) Dollar kosten. Sie kosten aber nur ca. 30 Euro – Wahnsinn, oder?

Technisch gesehen wird die bisherige Evolution der Chipentwicklung an Grenzen stossen. Die „elektrischen Stroeme beginnen zu lecken, da die Isolierschicht auf dem Chip nur noch wenige Atome duenn ist. Dadurch brauchen die Prozessoren mehr Strom und produzieren gleichzeitig mehr Waerme und muessen entsprechend gekuehlt werden“. Doch keine Angst, eine gaenzliche neue Technologie wird in wenigen Jahren produktionsreif sein, die hier diese Grenzen ueberschreiten kann.

Die kleinen Wunderdinger heissen „Memristoren“ – und sind eine Kombination aus Memory (Speicher) und Resistor (Widerstand). Anstatt Informationen nicht wie bisher in Form von Energie und Ladung zu speichern, verschieben sich bei den Memristoren Atome. Genauere Informationen koennen Sie dem Artikel entnehmen, dessen Link ich am Ende bekanntgebe.

Die Vorteile der Memristoren:

- Die verwendeten Materialien sind guenstiger

- Die Fertigung vom Memristoren ist guenstiger

- Memristoren sind nicht-fluechtige Speicher, Inhalte des Arbeitsspeichers sind auch nach Neustart immer noch vorhanden

- Deutlich mehr Informationen auf gleichem Raum, Handies und Tabletts koennten problemlos bis zu 10 mal mehr Daten bei gleichem Platzverbrauch unterbringen

- Deutlich schneller, da Memristoren Speicher und Prozessor in einem sind

- Deutlich weniger Stromverbrauch (Smartphones muessen heutzutage bei haeufigem Gebrauch meist taeglich an die Steckdose – mit Memristoren koennten sie mehrere Monate durchhalten)

Technisch habe ich den Beitrag hoechstens zu 10 % verstanden. Sehr wohl verstanden habe ich, dass damit eine neue Revolution stattfinden wird – Memristoren kommen der Funktionsweise des menschlichen Gehirns sicherlich eine grosse Stufe naeher. Was hier gleichzeitig auch passieren koennte, waere die Verschiebung von Maerkten. Das „W“ der „Wintel“ Fraktion hat ja schon an mehreren Fronten arg zu kaempfen, um die Vormachtstellung halten zu koennen. Bei den neuen winzigen Rechengenies koennte es auch „Intel“ an den Kragen gehen. Wir werden sehen….

Hier der Link zu dem Artikel in der Welt am Sonntag:

http://www.welt.de/print/wams/vermischtes/article13437543/Winzige-Rechengenies.html

GroupWise Live!

Thu, 19 May 2011 08:18:00 -0400

The last couple of weeks and days I have spoken to many many people within Novell or some Ex-Novell employees, which had to leave the company after the "merger" with Attachmate. Not all changes, which have been planned, are already executed, "integrating" such a big organisation like Novell into the Attachmate-Group takes some time. But they are making good progress. I don´t want to comment all changes now and I´m pretty sure, I don´t even know all upcoming changes. I´m going to concentrate on one change, which is very big IMHO. Please don´t only read the next sentence, read the full blog-entry. Otherwise you might misunderstand a lot:

GroupWise is dead. But only as a cash cow. Within the old Novell organisation, GroupWise was one of the major revenue streams within the hole organisation. There are still thousands of organisations around the world, which are using GroupWise as their collaboration-platform. Novell collected a lot of money, but only a small part of the money was re-invested into GroupWise again. The GroupWise revenue was used to finance other activities, e.g. to build new revenue streams.

With Novell now being part of the Attachmate-Group, the cash cow GroupWise is dead. That does - of course - not mean, that GroupWise as a product is dead, no. It means that the new Novell is going to re-invest money into GroupWise. This is fantastic news to all GroupWise customers and partners. The product is going to get a revival. I´m now working for GWAVA for 9 years (thinking about that makes me feel old) and this is the best news about GroupWise in all these years.

I´m happy for (at least) two reasons:

a) Business: GWAVA is the biggest 3rd party vendors for solutions around Novell GroupWise. We have 8 different solutions, which are used by thousands of organisations worldwide. For "my" business, this change is going to be fantastic.

b) Private: GroupWise is the best email-/collaboration product in the market (that is my very personal opinion). Investments into GroupWise means, that I do not have to look for any alternative.

So, Attachmate, thank you very much. It is the first time in my life, that I´m happy, that something/someone died. Dead cash cow - GroupWise forever!

GWAVA – Family and friends program

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:31:00 -0400

Normally a family and friends program“ is known, when a company goes public. The company invites their employees and the family and friends of their employees to become shareholder of the company for a discounted price. This is not about GWAVA going public. I have no information, if there are any plans of going public in the future, but if so, I would not be the guy to publish something in a personal blog entry. The thing I wanted to “talk” about is a different kind of “family and friends program”. It is nothing written down in any contract or company guide, it is part of the culture of this company.

I have been in hospital about 3 weeks ago to get an operation (nothing very serious, however it was painful). After the operation I had to spend two weeks at home. It was the first time ever in my business life, that I did spend more than 1 week in total (except holiday of course) not being able to work. The first two weeks I was mainly concentrating on my health and pain issues. The last week I got much better and I had a “good” time with my family (my wife Andrea and my two kids Hannah and Christopher).

I also had some time to think about different things. I forced myself not to think about business related issues, because I know by heart, that this is a non-stopable process for me. But my thoughts were however concentrated on GWAVA somehow, not so much on the business side, but on the personal side.

GWAVA for me is a second family, taking care about me in good as well as in bad times. GWAVA is much more for me, than a company where I do earn my money. It is not a typical public US based softwarecompany on the stock market, where the quarterly results always have highest priority. Our two owners Marc and Charles take care about the people within GWAVA and in return the people are delivering great work and good results.

The “friends” part is also very important for me. Out of the GWAVA business I got so many friends all over the world – I´m only going to name a few of them here (Ken/Kim, Ernie, Richard, … in the US, Marc, Charles, Taylor, Carsten, Perry…. In Canada, Vaclav in Czech Republic, Laurence, Chris, John in the UK, Dirk, Ronel, Corne in South Africa, Roel, Ronald, Cor …. in the Netherlands, Paul and Johan in Belgium, Josef in Italy, Andreas and Horst in Switzerland, “Dynamite” Tommy in Denmark, Didi and Volkmar in Austria and of course “tons” in my own little country Germany). I have to travel a lot, but the chance to combine business with meeting one of my friends is huge. So within my daily work for GWAVA I created a network of friends in a lot of countries.

GWAVA for me is the best company I have ever worked for. This company offers me a great job and besides that, it is a second type of family for me and created a huge worldwide network of friends. And this is not just an internal thing/behavior. We honor our relationships with our customers and partners in the same way. Everything within GWAVA is build on trust and long term relationship. That is the reason, why the huge majority of our customers and partners are very happy with GWAVA and are staying with GWAVA.

Whenever GWAVA might go public in the future, I ´m going to participate in the “normal” Family and friends program as well. There might be companies, which might be more successful as GWAVA, but I doubt if there is any company, which is “treating” their employees and customers/partners in the same way.

Spring is a time for change

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:09:00 -0400

Greetings. It's been a cold spring here in Montreal. Fortunately the extra time spent indoors here at GWAVA HQ have been productive as we've been working hard on a few new major releases of our most popular solutions.

Retain 2.5 was recently released and has been one of the most challenging projects in GWAVA's history. As many of us have been working on GroupWise for a decade or more it has been a real eye opening experience to develop an archiving solution for Exchange. Luckily, we've been able to learn a lot from our competition and adapt quickly to build upon the stability and success of our existing archiving platform. We are really excited to do something 'new' and to see how far we can take it. One of the coolest things about Retain 2.5 is the ability to archive, store and discover email data from both a GroupWise and Exchange system from one single Retain system. We're even more excited to broaden Retain's offerings later this year when we introduce new integrations for social networking and instant messaging content as well as branching out our cloud support.

In other product news the GWAVA product team has been working towards our next release which will feature a new multi-tenancy, policy based engine. We are also really excited to get this wrapped up soon as it will allow GWAVA to broaden it's cloud and SaaS delivery model for this solution.

You can also expect to see a new Reload release as well as Redline 4 and more in 2011 as we work towards delivering the road map presented at GWAVACon Torrance this past January.

If you have any feedback or comments please feel free to contact me directly.

Business travelers who travel outside of the United States with laptops and other digital electronic devices

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:50:00 -0400

Business travelers who travel outside of the United States with laptops and other digital electronic devices run the risk of having them seized for inspection upon their return.

In United States v Cotterman No.09-10139, Filed March 30, 2011, the Unites States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District held on a two to one split the seizure without reasonable cause by Federal Authority of a laptop computer at a border crossing and its subsequent retention for off site inspection, did not violate the unreasonable search and seizure component of the Fourth Amendment.

The computer was partially examined at the border entry but then sent to another installation when password protected files were found,. The laptop was the property of a registered sex offender who was ultimately charged and convicted of possessing child pornography in association with the search.

The Court built on the already established principle that border searches do not require reasonable cause and held that reasonable cause is not required for a seizure either even where this amounts to temporary deprivation of the device. This effectively extends the border search doctrine to off site inspections as well as those at the point of entry.

Those carrying legal but sensitive information in digital devices should consider whether they wish to risk having the data reviewed before leaving the United States with their laptop or other electronic device.