EMC Expands GRC Channel Opportunity with SourceOne Email Monitoring

Originally introduced last April and drawing strong interest from the channel, EMC's SourceOne family of GRC (governance, risk and compliance) products is getting a family extension.

Available now, SourceOne Email Supervisor enables customers to monitor inbound and outbound e-mail and instant messages for compliance with policies and regulations including those mandated by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD).  

Increasingly, organizations are being mandated to supervise and monitor electronic communications. One example of this is brokerage firms and securities dealers under NASD Rules 3010 and 3100. And even when it's not a regulatory requirement, companies must still enforce policies to prevent risky, unethical or illegal communications, says EMC's Greg Kosinski, director, product marketing.

Working together with SourceOne Email Management, the new solution provides the following key capabilities: flexibility in defining and customizing business policies to determine which messages will be sampled for review; ability for supervisors to create and manage review groups as well as assign reviewers into each group; easy navigation to highlighted text in both the message body and attachments to clearly indicate the content and business policy that caused the message to be flagged; and providing proof of compliance with comprehensive reports to meet stringent NASD 3010 requirements of keeping auditable records of supervisory reviews.  

While originally of interest to the financial sector, other market segments are starting to embrace the company's GRC solutions, says Kosinski. Government, healthcare and manufacturing are all contributing to make SourceOne EMC's fastest growing product family. It's a very cost-effective and affordable solution that pays big margins and can be implemented with organizations with as few as 15 participating users, he says.

SourceOne has been a huge success in the channel, confirms EMC's Ken Grohe, vice president of partner sales, Americas. The margins for partners on this offering, which is subscription-based, have been 46 percent on registered deals, and 70 percent of sales, and 80 percent of implementations have gone through the channel. "It helps smaller partners really well," he says.

And it helps EMC because partners can get it quicker to revenue, he adds.

Grohe says 80 percent of EMC's SourceOne sales forecasts are agencies, financial or healthcare organizations that are further along on the HIPPA scale, but at a manufacturers' event last week he cautioned them about the hazards of GRC. "I told them if you're an American company and you make a product, you will get sued." The best way to protect your company against frivolous claims is EMC, he told them.

In addition to SourceOne Email Management, which archives e-mail from Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino as well as SMTP and instant messages, the family includes SourceOne Discovery Manager for high-volume email discovery search and collection and  SourceOne  Discovery Collector, a set of complementary partner appliance offerings that that automate the in-house identification, collection, preservation, and policy management of unstructured content.

EMC reports SourceOne customers can save more than 50 percent in total cost of ownership and achieve payback on the solution in as little as 12 months. For companies with 1,000 mailboxes, savings will average $1 million in a single year, and companies can also realize a reduction of up to 60 percent in storage and backup costs.