Mimecast digs its way into the information bank

It has a chief scientist, Nathaniel Borenstein, who was hired three months ago and was previously an IBM distinguished engineer. He joined the company to achieve things he couldn't do at IBM. There, the corporate bureaucracy and excessive company size meant that it was virtually impossible co-ordinate all the relevant company resources on topics such as SPAM control. During 2006 he had a meeting set up between IBM and Symantec to discuss an anti-SPAM alliance and found out IBM had bought Symantec's then biggest competitor Internet Security Systems on the day of the meeting, rendering it pointless and embarrassing.

Truism that information is today's business currency

It's a truism that information is today's business currency. Borenstein considers Mimecast is like a bank that takes in customer information deposits. He is looking at capturing and storing new types of information on the one hand, and new ways of mining it on the other.

"Archiving e-mail is fixing a big enough pain for customers. Suppose, you could do ... telephony archiving in the same way as email. ... You could run phone messages through voice recognition and transcription processing and get rough voice speech records ... and have them searchable."

Storing voice-over-IP (VOIP) calls would be a little simpler as they are digital when they enter the system. He says: "HPPA data requirements don't generally apply to phone calls because phone record archiving was not thought to be possible when HPPA was conceived."

Good idea for lawyers

Borenstein reckons telephony recording might be a good idea for lawyers and finance trading companies: "Lawyers could choose it in advance of regulation." In the finance world regulators might find it very desirable to have a record of all traders' business calls when investigating market irregularities.