OTG Spins A "Gorey" Tale About Lethal Email.

An interview with Bill Caple, executive vice president, OTG 

Editor 's note: eMailXtender is a product within OTG's Xtender suite that migrates email to storage devices, offers intelligent search capabilities, and automatically stores and indexes email messages and attachments. Shipping date is June 30. Caple began with a comment:

Caple: More headlines again this morning in respect to the Al Gore problem.

CTR: Al Gore has a problem?

Caple: He's lost a year's worth of e-mail due to a technical glitch with a backup tape. With our product that would never have happened.

CTR: I'm sorry for the Vice President, but what an illustration for your product!

Caple: Oh yeah! (laughter)

CTR: eMailXtender is part of the Xtender suite, of which DiskXtender is the core technology?

Caple: The core technology is DiskXtender, where the key is to keep data available at your fingertips and keeping that data interactive in a real live operational and application world, not just backing up your data like an insurance policy.

CTR: Is eMailXtender also a stand-alone product?

Caple: eMailXtender is stand-alone or you can combine it with DiskXtender. For example, eMailXtender can work with a RAID environment by managing all aspects of email management and email movement off the email system itself and storing it intelligently on a RAID array. Then if you want to further migrate the data to a secondary device, you can add more DiskXtender functionality to move those emails off to a tape library or jukebox or whatever you want.

CTR: With intelligent search capability, can users enter their own parameters for storing email messages?

Caple: Absolutely. We call them migration rules. Migration rules can be entered in terms of how soon you want messages or attachments to be moved off of the email store and onto secondary storage devices, and end users can also set the particular rules of how they want to build the intelligence into message indexing once they're stored out.

CTR: Is there a major email package eMailXtender does not work with?

Caple: No, we've covered those. Of course, as the product progresses with new versions and new features we'll add more functionality on a platform-specific basis. For instance, we're putting out some additional functionality on the MS Exchange system with the Lotus Notes version to follow a couple of months after that.

CTR: What are some of the market opportunities for eMailXtender?

Caple: There's been a metamorphosis of email as a utility in that it's really now a kind of predominant documentation center within organizations. Email is the predominant way people collaborate and exchanges occur. That is clearly going to expand; that collaboration will become very complex and reach the point of mission-critical kinds of exchanges and documentation. So someone is going to have to keep a record of those, manage those, store those, index those and ensure quick and intelligent access back to them, and that's exactly where we're going with this product. It's a very comprehensive approach, where eMailXtender will control and intelligently store and manage all those kinds of communications.