Informatica partners with Exterro

Exterro and Informatica have announced a partnership. While the latter will be very familiar to readers of my various articles and blogs the former may well not be. Indeed, until just recently, it wasn’t familiar to me either. This is because Exterro is a vendor in the eDiscovery space, which is a bit out of my comfort zone. I understand (this is what they tell me – and a certain provider of magic quadrants appears to agree) that the company focuses on the Global 2000 and is the leading independent (as opposed to 800lb gorillas like HP and IBM) vendor in the space.

The partnership is specifically between Exterro Fusion and the Informatica Data Archive, which is Informatica’s data archiving solution, and extends to joint sales and marketing as well as technical integration. What it means is that you can do things like place a legal hold or and enforce in-place preservation across both structured data and unstructured documents. This is important because it will often be the case that application data, for example, will pertain to any investigation. And that’s regardless of whether this is specifically a legal matter or it may be because of regulatory requests (for example, to ensure due diligence) or for internal fraud investigations.

Just to be complete, and for the benefit of eDiscovery aficionados who are not familiar with the Informatica Data Archive I should say that this supports archiving based on business rules for both the inclusion and removal of data. This solution also includes the ability to monitor data for usage so that you can archive on that basis as well as on business rules. A major feature is that it can store archived data on HDFS (Hadoop distributed file system) so it can be implemented on low cost and easily scalable hardware. While Exterro provides MD5 compliant hashing for tamper proofing purposes Informatica also describes its archive as “immutable”. As a provider of data masking software, archived information can be hidden from prying eyes and, of course, archived information is based on complete business entities that can be discovered using the Informatica Data Explorer tool for profiling purposes.

This partnership would seem to offer Exterro access to all of Informatica’s user base and it significantly extends Informatica’s offering, especially when competing with the likes of IBM. So, it would seem to be good for both parties. The only question is whether, at some point in the future, Informatica – which has a habit of acquiring its partners – will do the same with Exterro.