By Sue Clarke, Senior Research Analyst, Butler Group

Autonomy is beginning to demonstrate how it will derive value from its acquisition of ZANTAZ. It has just announced that its contact center clients are now able to take advantage of an offsite, hosted archiving solution for storing, managing, and retrieving customer call centre recordings. The offering is based on Autonomy's etalk Qfiniti recording system and ZANTAZ Digital Safe, which is an archiving Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. This provides customers with a secure storage facility for their audio files, and more importantly allows them to discover and retrieve these files to satisfy e-discovery requests. Autonomy's etalk hosted archiving solution provides organizations with an unlimited amount of storage space in which to archive, search, and retrieve voice and screen recordings. The solution integrates with Qfiniti, which means that users can search, access, and playback archived recordings using the Qfiniti interface.

Regulatory compliance does not just demand the retention of written content, but also other forms of unstructured information including audio recordings. Each time I interact with a call centre and hear the message "Your call may be recorded for quality control purposes" or "for training purposes", I feel like shouting down the phone, "No, you are recording this call for compliance purposes or for litigation risk". This reinforces the fact that most call centers now retain audio content, and that there is a huge demand for archiving facilities for such content.

Many organizations retain this type of content in their internal archives along with other types of content that must be retained. However, if it is to be retained in the long-term, it runs the same risk as other types of content in that it will probably exist beyond the lifetime of both the application and the file format in which it was created. This is where a hosted approach could be advantageous, particularly one using ZANTAZ's technology, as it is a company that specializes in retrieving and discovering legacy content for organizations.

One of the problems with archives is that as organizations need to retain content for increasing periods of time, and the volume of content they need to retain increases, the amount of physical space needed for the archive becomes an issue, even if techniques such as compression and single instance storage are deployed in the archive. Using a hosted solution alleviates the problem, even if organizations adopt a hybrid approach and archive their written content internally, and use a hosted solution for other types of content, for example audio content and e-mails. However, the problem with this approach is that separate searches will typically need to be made on the in-house archived content and the hosted content, to satisfy a single discovery request. What organizations need to be able to do is to search across internal and external sources with a single action, and with its own search engine, Autonomy should be able to provide this functionality.

We are beginning to see how Autonomy intends to combine its search and speech analytics technologies with ZANTAZ's archiving solutions. Another area of synergy will be with ZANTAZ's legal discovery software, which takes content already discovered using a search engine, and enables legal teams to examine the content to determine its relevance to a discovery request. One of the issues for Autonomy in the past has been that although it has innovative technology, it has lacked the front-end applications available from its competitors. Through acquisitions, such as that of ZANTAZ, it will be able to counter its deficiencies and compete more effectively in the applications and solutions marketplaces. ENS