The 451 Group is holding two conference in London later this month.

The first is our European client event, which is being held on Monday June 27 and features three analyst presentations and one from Steve O’Connor, Director of Technology for Parliamentary ICT at the UK Houses of Parliament. The full agenda is here.

Two of the presentations are specifically  focused on information management. Matt Aslett is presenting on Total Data, our take on the the increasing volume and variety of data, combined with a greater understanding about its potential value. I’ll be preceding Matt with an overview of information risk management as we see it, focusing on how the increase in information volume and variety heightens the risk environment and what some companies have done to tackle it. Clients of 451 Group can come to the conference at no extra charge as it is included in the price of their annual relationships with us. Non-clients can also come for a fee, please email me for details

The following two days – Tuesday June 28 and Wednesday June 29 are focused on hosting and cloud issues with our Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS). The agenda features a wide variety of speaker, both from 451 Group and from numerous end users in markets including financial services, government, media, telecommunications and transportation.

The highlight for many will likely be listening to, and asking questions of, Professor Brian Cox, the Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University and one of the leaders on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. In the UK he is well known for two massively popular science programmes, Wonders of the Solar System and, in 2011, Wonders of the Universe, the first of which is also now on in the US on the Science Channel. He will be talking about all the things that interest him, and there will be ample time for Q&A.

Seats are selling fast and 451 clients who attend the client event get a discount to HCTS. We also have some discount codes avaiable, so if you’re not a client and would like to attend, please get in touch via email or Twitter (@NickPatience).

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

Most of the information management team are attending the 4th annual 451 client event, which takes place in Boston next week, November 2-3, so I thought I’d let you know what we’re up to.

Four of us are presenting, here’s the dates/times (all ET) and themes:

• Nov 3, 3.30-4.15: Matt Aslett – Open source to the rescue?

Can open source really help enterprises cut costs and ride out the economic storm? What has been the impact of current conditions on open source adoption? How is this being reflected in the business strategies of vendors – both open source specialists and traditional proprietary vendors?

• Nov 4, 11.00-11.45: Nick Patience & Kathleen Reidy – E-Discovery to Information Governance: From Reactive, Unavoidable Cost to Proactive Cost-Avoidance.

E-discovery is a market without a lot of discretionary spending – legal events and investigations occur, and require that organizations produce relevant electronic information, no matter the difficulties or costs. This fact has driven lots of vendors from various sectors to the e-discovery (also known as e-disclosure) market: it is driving business in the archiving, enterprise content management and enterprise search markets, as organizations want to figure out how to better prepare for litigation before it occurs.

• Nov 4, 11.45-12.30: Simon Robinson –  Storage Technology Is Thriving in the Economic Downturn

The economy is shrinking, but data is growing. Almost universally, storage vendors claim they can help IT ‘do more with less’ by squeezing more value out of storage assets to meet rampant data growth and stiffer retention criteria. This presentation will examine how three key trends in storage innovation – optimization, unification and the cloud – are helping some storage vendors thrive in this uncertain climate. The session will conclude with a vendor panel discussion.

Henry Baltazar is also attending and we’re all avaiable for 1:1s, though some of our days are getting pretty near to full. Contact your account rep about booking a slot.

If you are a client and you’re not attending then you’re missing out on one of the key beneifts of being a client!

If you’re not a client and you wish to attend, you can do that too, only you’ll have to pay to get in. Either way, you can register here.

Beyond information management all our other themes will be address including cloud (a lot!), security, virtualization, eco-efficient IT and our popular M&A panel, which always comes right before cocktails on day 1.

See you there!

Our webinar last week on information governance went well and generated some interesting questions.  I didn’t get to answer all the questions on the call so I’ll take the opportunity to briefly answer some of them here, including some of the more interesting ones I did answer live.   Most of these topics were covered in much more detail in our recently published report on information governance, which also spawned the webinar. The full recorded webinar is also available online as well.

Q: Can you talk to any trends you see in terms of who in an organization is purchasing governance/e-discovery tools?

This is something covered in some detail in the report itself.  In general, there’s some difference in terms of purchasing between “governance” and “e-discovery.”  If the use case being addressed in a particular procurement process is specifically for reactive e-discovery – meaning, the ability to respond to a specific legal discovery request – then the process is likely to have heavy involvement from the legal department if not full ownership by that team with IT involvement.

Governance is generally broader and is likely to involve more underlying pieces of technology (e.g., archiving, records management, indexing tools for distributed data and e-discovery / early case assessment).  There’s certainly no single approach to governance and most organizations are in the earliest of stages in terms of putting in place some kind of broader governance strategy.  Procurement is still likely to be tied to more tactical requirements and the specifics of those requirements will dictate who’s involved (e.g., e-discovery is more likely to be run by legal, as noted above, while an email archiving decision is more likely to be led by IT with legal involvement).  Generally speaking, hashing out broader governance strategies may well involve IT (email management, storage, ECM and search folks), legal, compliance officers, records managers and security personnel, among others.

Q: What are your thoughts about how far right along EDRM the big ECM vendors will move?

So far, ECM vendors are focusing on the far left of the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM).  This has expanded in the last twelve months or so from a far more limited focus solely on the “information management” process step to greater capabilities for data identification, collection, preservation, and some review and analysis.  This is likely to continue, though I’d be surprised to see ECM vendors move beyond this.  Identification, collection and preservation will be key areas in the short term (EMC’s recent Kazeon buy is a good example of how ECM vendors will look to better handle distributed data).  Review and analysis capabilities are likely to remain in the area of early-case assessment, with the expectation that a winnowed-down set of data is still likely to be turned over to external counsel for further review and analysis. That’s likely to be where most ECM vendors stop, though not all; Autonomy, for example, plays specifically in the legal market as well with iManage and Discovery Mining.

Q: Can you explain a bit more what you mean by “litigation readiness”?   What processes does this cover?

I guess this is a phrase I use a lot when talking about information governance and perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough on the webinar.  Litigation readiness is really just one reason organizations are interested in information governance.  Poor information governance makes it difficult to respond efficiently and cost effectively to e-discovery.  There are a number of processes involved in better preparing for litigation, but ideally, organizations need to have some high-level understanding of what data exists, where it is and who has access to it.  That’s a whole lot easier said than done of course, particularly when you need to include data on desktops, laptops, shared file drives and so forth.  The processes generally need to encompass maintaining some kind of index of what resides on all those devices and how that data will be captured and secured if needed.  That needs to be combined of course with more formalized management of data in archives and records management systems, with some consistency in terms of retention and disposition policies (that are standardized and enforced) across sources.  Few organizations have a very good handle on this sort of thing across repositories and unmanaged devices today, but those that are more often involved in litigation are likely to be more litigation-ready.

Q: Is Information Governance of primary interest in the US or are companies in Europe also concerned? I.e. is there an opportunity for vendors beyond the US?

Information governance as it relates primarily to litigation readiness is of primary interest to those in the US and in parts of Europe that have similar discovery or disclosure requirements for electronic information.  In geographies that don’t yet have as strict requirements for electronic discovery, governance may still be an interest but may be for different reasons.  Compliance with specific regulations (e.g., privacy-related legislation) can be a concern, for example, as can IP protection or other types of security.   So there is certainly opportunity for vendors in specific markets, such as archiving, but the drivers might be different.

That’s probably enough for one blog post.  Again, those interested in the full webinar can find it here.

This Thursday I’ll host a short webinar to discuss some of the findings from our recently-published report on the emerging Information Governance market.  This report looks at how archiving, records management and e-discovery technologies are coming together to help organizations get a better handle on internal data for litigation readiness and compliance purposes.

The webinar is free and open to anyone, so please feel free to join if you’re interested in this topic.

During the webinar, I’ll outline some of the trends we uncovered while doing our research for this report, look at the vendor landscape and M&A activity in this area, and briefly discuss some of the technologies that we think will be important in this sector moving forward.

Here’s the info and registration link:

The Rise of Information Governance webinar

Thursday, September 24, 2009

12:00 – 1:00 PM EDT

Register here

Recorded versions of our webcasts are available on our site a short while after the events are over.

Later than I intended, I wanted to give you a quick update of last week’s client event and information management’s presence at it. Kathleen, Simon, Henry, Matt and me were engaged in many 1:1s – I had 15 over the two days, which were very useful for me and more importantly, from feedback we’ve had, useful to the other person as well. Some of our analysts were booked back to back, doing 20+ meetings; that level of engagement is one of the main values we deliver at our conferences.

On the presentation and panels front, Kathleen did a great job of laying out her vision of how collaboration and social software are finally impacting content technologies, moving beyond just things that enable you to create content, to enable organizations to better handle the risks that can create. Some people who weren’t able to hear her live have asked to hear it by way of a followup – if you do, please get in touch.

My panel was great, comprising Sid Probstein, CTO of Attivio, Stephen Whetstone of Iron Mountain-Stratify and Nicole Eagan, CMO of Autonomy. We were in the after lunch slot but given we were talking mainly about eDiscovery, the future of search and the effects of the credit crunch on information management, we still got people’s attention.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it, listen to what Sid says about it, plus his thoughts on other aspect of the event here and here. I couldn’t have put it better myself!

See you in Boston next year, I hope.

It’s the annual event for 451 clients next week in Boston, MA.

Kathleen, Katey and myself will be there along with most other 451 analysts and would love to meet any and all readers of this blog there. I’ll be presenting and moderating a panel discussion with representatives of Attivio, Autonomy and Iron Mountain-Stratify that will discuss the future of enterprise search, how information management is affected by the financial crisis and, of course, eDiscovery.

Kathleen’s presentation examines trends on content technologies in particular where the opportunities exist around creating content, leveraging it and managing risk, i.e. information governance.

The complete agenda is here and here’s how to register. Hope to see you there!