IT giant to answer compliance needs with e-discovery platform

HP has announced a major revamp of its software and services portfolio designed to continue the company's push into the burgeoning information management and business intelligence (BI) software market.

Central to the refresh is the launch of a new archiving and e-discovery platform designed to provide an integrated hardware and software solution capable of automating email archiving and discovery processes.

HP said the new Integrated Archive Platform would bring together several of its existing storage software products, including its Reference Information Storage Systems archiving platform and Reference Information Management data mining capabilities. These will combine with its Smart Cells storage hardware to provide firms with a "factory-integrated" offering.

Tim Nolte, European product manager for information management at HP, said the new platform would aid firms' regulatory compliance efforts and also help them respond quicker to legal demands for the disclosure of electronic documents and emails increasingly associated with litigation.

"E-discovery as a result of litigation is now a red hot topic in the States and we expect it to become a bigger issue in Europe in the next couple of years in the same way as concerns over compliance crossed the Atlantic," he said.

Brian Babineau, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said corporate spending on e-discovery capabilities was set to increase, adding that growing legal risks meant firms had "little choice but to invest in the right technologies to deliver the necessary data quickly and easily".

The integration of HP's existing archiving and e-discovery products into a single platform has also enhanced the scalability of its offering and led to a reduction in the cost per terabyte of around 50 percent compared to HP's previous products, according to Nolte.

Separately, HP announced a further expansion to its services offerings with the launch of a new BI maturity model for assessing and optimising firms' adoption of reporting and analytics technologies, and a new Data Centre Transformation services package designed to help firms enhance datacentre performance and efficiency.

Completing the revamp, HP also announced an updated version of its Demand and Portfolio Management solution for monitoring and managing IT projects and unveiled enhancements to its HP Data Protector backup and recovery solution for Microsoft Exchange, designed to provide online disk and tape-based backup and recovery of Exchange 2007.