FileTalk - An Accellion Blog

I recently had an opportunity to watch race car driving live at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma. If you’re a car enthusiast like me, nothing is more exciting than seeing hot sports cars driving fast on a track. Drivers are continually trying to outmaneuver each other to gain position and push their own driving abilities to the limit.

Equally interesting was the experience of watching drivers suit up and prep their cars before each race. This ritual had me thinking about the safety equipment drivers use to ensure a safe experience on the track. They wear helmets, gloves, neck braces, and fire-retardant suits, socks, and shoes. Their cars have roll cages to prevent the passenger compartment from getting crushed in the event of a rollover accident.

Race Car Driver – Adam Huff

Just as race car drivers need to be concerned about safety on the track, organizations also need to be concerned about the security and confidentiality of the information they share. But not all safety equipment or, in this case, collaboration solutions are created equal.

Some collaboration solutions focus entirely on ease of use rather than security. It is like driving a car without a seat-belt. This might be adequate most of the time, but you don’t want your organizations’ 10-K ending up on CNBC before the official quarterly announcement is made. We wear seat-belts every day because we never know when we’ll be in an accident. Likewise, your organization needs to securely share information on an on-going basis because you never know when you’ll need that security.

Other collaboration solutions created like Fort Knox are built for specific file sharing use cases. These might be an option for negotiating billion dollar deals where money is no object, but not for organizations looking to deploy secure collaboration solutions across enterprise. Using this type of solution is like driving a Volvo along a quiet 25 mph two-lane country road with a racing helmet and harness.

And lastly, some collaboration applications contain both the ease-of-use internal and external users’ need, while giving the enterprise organization the protection it requires. Accellion offers organizations the ability to securely share files with people across corporate boundaries, while ensuring enterprise security and compliance. Accellion is like driving a zippy, yet safe Acura TL or a BMW 328i with a regular seat-belt. You have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that your information is being shared securely.

We should all thank Corinne Schmid at CMSWire for reminding us of the central role that employees play in Enterprise Collaboration. Far too often articles on collaboration focus on business benefits derived from collaboration, rather than the efficiencies gained by individuals. But the fact remains that if:

“Enterprise Collaboration is a journey, it is used to reach a destination by its drivers – Employees.”

As Corinne puts it succinctly:

“Employees collaborate, not enterprises.”

It is important to remember who will be using the collaboration system. Every stakeholder will use the system differently and need the system for different reasons. Hence, it is important to understand why users will be using an Enterprise Collaboration solution, i.e. what pain points are they trying to ameliorate? And lastly, it’s important to ensure that employees have the right tools and receive the proper product training so that they don’t abandon using tools.

While this article may strike some as motherhood-and-apple pie, the fact remains that many solutions are created with minimal input from real users. So how do you create a great solution that meets the needs of actual users? You interact with your valued users on a daily basis to ensure that your solutions truly meet their needs. During the product development process you understand your users’ pain-points and how they want to use the system. You create personas to help sales understand the different usage scenarios. And finally, you work with customers to ensure a smooth deployment and usage.

At Accellion, we’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with our customers for the past year as we developed Accellion Secure Collaboration. That experience gave us some great insight into how our end-users work. I would like to think this is why our customers continue to stay with us year after year to give us a nearly 100% renewal rate. And why they can’t deploy Accellion Secure Collaboration fast enough.

I’m a certified news junkie. I read at least half a dozen online publications every day and one of my favorite sites is GigaOM, in particular their WebWorkerDaily articles. I enjoy reading their articles on how social media is disrupting information flows in the enterprise, and the impact of the increasing use of consumer technologies in the workplace.

I don’t think we’re alone in Silicon Valley when we see the proliferation of consumer technologies in the workplace. The trend does have its benefits, such as ease-of-use and employee productivity, but it is not without its risks. In particular, consumer technologies pose risks to data security and compliance.

This week in GigaOM, Simon Mackie takes on the consumer technologies used for file sharing and discusses how Accellion Secure Collaboration brings, “easy Dropbox-style file sharing and collaboration to the enterprise, while also providing IT with the tracking and control to ensure data security and demonstrate compliance with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and FDA requirements.” The article acknowledges the need for solutions to ensure data security and to comply with regulations.

When free consumer services are used for email and file-sharing of confidential data, this can easily trigger regulatory violations by putting confidential data outside the control of the enterprise IT department. We recently had a financial services firm replace their free file-sharing solution with Accellion in order to securely send confidential files to customers, ensure IT has visibility into all file sharing, and to present a more professional image during the file sharing process.

The ability to securely share information with internal and external collaborators is more important than ever before. Today, collaboration holds the key to business success. Employees, partners, vendors and customers work together to develop, market, and sell products and services. But with competition fierce, file sharing amongst teams must be secure. The ease of use of consumer products can’t trump the security required to ensure that confidential information is protected and regulations are complied with.

We’re growing by leaps and bounds here at Accellion. We had a breakout 2010 and the momentum continues today.   Since the beginning of the year we’ve barely had time to catch our breath. We just wrapped up our Q1 Customer Conference last week where we shared with our customers the new products and features coming out in 2011.

But I’m officially taking a few moments to celebrate our 1,000^th customer win and to thank our loyal customers for their continued support.

I thought it would be fun to take a look at how we got to 1,000 enterprise customers and some of the milestones along the way:

Customer #1 –Ogilvy & Mather, one of the largest marketing communications companies in the world.  They are still an Accellion customer after all these years. Now that’s some customer loyalty!

Customer #10 – NCI Information Systems, a leading information technology, systems engineering and integration company. Yup they‘re still an Accellion customer too.

Customer #25 – Procter & Gamble, a global company that provides consumer products in the areas of pharmaceuticals, cleaning supplies, personal care, and pet supplies. Yup, them too!

Customer #100 – AL Tayer Group, operates leading, quality-focused businesses in automobile sales and service, luxury and lifestyle retail, perfumes and cosmetics distribution, engineering as well as interiors contracting. Yes, you guessed right – still an Accellion customer!

Customer #500 – IBA Health, a health information technology company that engages in the development and licensing of computer software to the healthcare industry. Yes, right again. Still an Accellion customer!

Customer #1,000 – Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is a not-for-profit center for engineering, research, and development.   APL is a division of one of the world’s premier research universities, The Johns Hopkins University (JHU).   And one of our newer Accellion customers!

In case you had any doubt, virtually all our customers stay with Accellion year after year, which explains our renewal rate of 98%.

At Accellion we value our customers, which is reflected in the commitment we have to customer support, the quality of our solution and our desire to really solve our customers problems related to delivering secure file sharing to their organizations.

Enterprise organizations continue to choose Accellion for a few key reasons:

• We offer a true enterprise solution – designed to scale with business needs.
• We offer flexible deployment options – we understand that one-size does not fit all when it comes to enterprise
deployments. Virtual, public, private and hybrid cloud are all options with Accellion.
• We believe strongly in delivering a solution that is easy to use for both IT and the end users.

So thank you again to all our customers and we are looking forward to our next customer milestone.

For the first time, Accellion exhibited at SPTechCon: The SharePoint Technology Conference in San Francisco, CA.   Since we introduced our SharePoint Plug-in last year we have chatted with a steady stream of SharePoint customers interested in how our solution augments the transfer of files from SharePoint, particularly file transfers with external parties.  Interestingly enough, a recent report published just in time for this two day conference states that SharePoint 2010 deployments jumped from 8% to 44% between September 2010 to now.   We can confirm this fact since many of those financial services, health care, and technology Fortune 1000 firms were walking the show floor and visiting our Accellion booth.

The show was a great opportunity for SharePoint enthusiasts to learn everything under the sun about SharePoint – from how to become a SharePoint power user to custom branding SharePoint to using fixed query searches.  There was something for everyone at the show as long as you “Liked” SharePoint.

We showcased our SharePoint Plug-in that extends our secure files transfer capabilities to SharePoint. With the plug-in, organizations can securely transfer files from SharePoint to both internal and external parties, without needing to create an external facing server farm.   In fact, many of those Fortune 1000 companies who swung by the Accellion booth wanted to use our plug-in to close security holes in the Microsoft Productivity Suite (SharePoint, OCS, and Exchange).

Don’t worry if you missed us at SPTechCon. Accellion is participating in a whole host of events in 2011.  And, I’ll be reporting from RSA next week to deliver the latest news on  security products and services for the Enterprise.

In the first installment of our employee spotlight, we chat with Evan, one of our engineers at Accellion. Evan is not only a savvy engineer who has worked on a few open source projects (most prominently JRuby and Cshellsynth), but is also a critic and a writer.

1) What do you do at Accellion?

I’m an engineer. I create new features, build products, fix bugs; everything an engineer usually does. But mainly, I suppose, I think about things from the standpoint of an engineer.

2) How did you get into engineering? Is this something you always wanted to do? Was there someone in particular that influenced your choice of career?

Well, my first programming experience was in a Montessori school – I was in second grade. I learned to program on the Apple II there. Then, my grandmother, who is also a programmer and is very much the good scientist—she was always getting me those educational toys, like electronics kits and such—she sent me an old radio shack PC-2 along with a book on how to program it. I suppose that’s really where I started to get into it. After that, I picked up the usual hobbyist stuff for the time, Hypercard and Visual Basic and such, but I didn’t really start properly understanding code until I installed Linux in 2000 via the Linux From Scratch method.

3) What do you do when you’re not building products?

I’m currently finishing up my Master’s degree in English, so that takes up a lot of time. Other than that, I keep up with fields that I’m interested in such as critical code studies. Critical code studies is a pretty new discipline where people look at computer code with the perspectives of the humanities in mind. You look at a line of code and ask stuff like: what political assumptions are in this code? what cultural biases are in this code?

4) Tell us more about your interest in writing. What are you focusing on? What do you write about today?

In my master’s thesis I’m focusing on the history of promises and promising, as seen through their expression in finance. Specifically, I’m looking at the development of negotiability in the 16th century and its relationship to the development of algebraic notation. Negotiable instruments, or commercial paper, are documents that give some right to someone, where the right can be transferred by transferring the document. For example, when you sign the back of a check and then give it to your bank, you’re giving the right to the money contained therein to your bank. The bank then can demand payment from the issuing bank on your behalf. So with negotiability, the paper itself holds the value of the promise; it’s somehow in the paper. Prior to the 16th century negotiability didn’t exist. With its development, we get this concept of writing as constitutive of meaning, instead of simply referencing meaning. And from that, we get algebraic notation, and ultimately, code.

Thanks Evan for sharing your background with us and giving us all something to think about.  There is a lot of thought that goes into all Accellion’s products.

It’s been a whirl-wind couple of weeks here at Accellion.   Last week we launched our latest product – the Accellion iManage Plug-in, and this week we are showing it to Law Firm CIOs during LegalTech in New York.  As a product marketing manager, nothing is more exciting than seeing a product get launched.  After weeks and sometimes even months of planning, brain-storming, and writing, the whole world gets to see what we have in store for them.

And in particular it’s great to launch products that have a meaningful impact on peoples’ work.  Which is why I think the Accellion iManage Plug-in is a great tool for legal organizations. Our new iManage Plug-in basically allows legal staff to optimize usage of their existing Autonomy iManage WorkSite Document Management System.  With the Accellion iManage Plug-in, users can securely send any size file stored in the iManage system to email recipients internal and external to their organization without leaving the iManage application. No longer do users need to download files from iManage to their desktop and search for a way to transfer them.  No more searching for a CD and a FedEx envelope, no more file sharing via USB sticks, no more attaching files to Outlook.  I love tools that make work-life more efficient.

But beyond creating efficiencies, the Accellion iManage Plug-in closes an important security loophole. By integrating Accellion into iManage, the opportunities for unsecure sharing of confidential information have been greatly reduced.  Files can now easily be sent securely.  Nothing is more embarrassing and legally risky than sending a confidential file to the wrong client or business partner.  With the Accellion iManage Plug-in files are encrypted and sent securely.  And, you even get an email telling you when someone has received that very important file you’ve sent them.

Accellion secure file sharing prevents legal professionals from getting into trouble when sharing confidential information with colleagues, partners, outside counsel and clients – and that’s a good thing.

The holidays came early for the Palo Alto team at Accellion.  We moved into our new corporate offices last week.  Don’t worry; we’re still in Palo Alto.  Our new office is right down the street from where we were before.  We’re still next to the San Francisco Baylands, but our new facility is bigger and brighter.  It offers all of the trimmings that a growing Silicon Valley company needs– a modern open environment,  an awesome lunch room where we can share great ideas, and plenty of space for our growing team to build, market, and sell Accellion products.   And yes, our team is growing!   We’re continuing to grow our team to deliver even bigger and better solutions in 2011.

And in this season of sharing and gratitude, the Accellion team would like to thank our customers, partners and vendors for helping make us a success.

Wishing you all the best for 2011 from the Accellion Team.

Watching the drama unfold with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks reminds me of the James Bond and Bourne movies.    Government secrets are revealed, diplomatic cables are leaked and unknown “agencies” are closing in on their target.   But while the diplomatic theatrics unfold, there is a lesson to be learned here for governments and businesses alike – Protect Your Data.

Protecting corporate and government data is serious business.   Threats can come from both disgruntled employees looking for retribution, as well as from external sources looking to profit from confidential information or looking to teach businesses and governments a lesson.

While James Bond movies are known for sophisticated gadgetry, protecting confidential information can be a lot simpler.   In fact, Accellion offers a few basic steps that will go a long way to keeping files secure within your organization:

• Ban the use of thumb-drives and CDs.
• Block access to personal file transfer sites.
• Provision users with a secure file transfer account to use for any file transfers – this way you’ll know just who received what files and when.
• Integrate a data loss prevention (DLP) solution with your secure file transfer system.  DLP solutions allow you to discover sensitive content, monitor its use on the network and enforce corporate policies to ensure its protection.

I just attended my first Accellion Customer Conference and I have to tell you that we have some very loyal and enthusiastic customers.  Both new and existing customers and partners attended this quarter’s conference, including IT professionals from organizations who have used Accellion secure file transfer since our first introduction in 2005.

Two customer guest speakers, from Thomson Reuters and HIT Entertainment shared their stories about why they needed Accellion and what they liked about our solution.  It was interesting hearing how these two customers have expanded their Accellion deployment over the years including transitioning from initial use of our physical appliance to deployment of the Accellion virtual appliance, and transitioning from using Accellion with Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

What fascinated me most about our conference was the breadth of our customer base.   On the one hand we had ThomsonReuters, which is one of the world’s leading organizations of intelligent information for businesses and professionals.  When I think of ThomsonReuters, I think of serious breaking news.  On the other hand we had HiT Entertainment, a company that creates entertainment content including Bob the Builder, Barney& Friends, and Thomas & Friends.  For those of you with kids, these characters are probably already house-hold names!

Besides our wonderful guest speakers, our VP of Marketing Paula Skokowski and Product Manager Mary Nicknish delivered a 2010 new product round up, a sneak peak at new products and features planned for 2011, including product demos.

If you’re a customer who missed our most recent conference, please visit the Accellion Forum and listen to a recording of the event.  If you haven’t tried Accellion before, please contact our Sales team.  We’d love to share with you how Accellion can help your organization securely transfer content to your colleagues, vendors, partners, and customers.