Software testing firm TestPro is considering moving its email and knowledge management systems offshore after taking up IBM’s Singapore-based cloud offering last August.

The 30-person company retired three physical servers last year, when it moved its IBM Rational Team Concert project management software out of an Australian managed service facility.

TestPro managing director Scott Marchant said the move to utility pricing shaved two-thirds off the company’s infrastructure operating costs in December.

The company currently consumes Microsoft Exchange email as a service from a Western Australian provider that Marchant described as “alright, just not as cheap”.

He expected TestPro to consider moving to another, cheaper cloud-based email provider this year.

“We’re in the process of working that out in the next couple of months; our interest will be to do that in the next three to six months,” he said.

IBM introduced its SmartCloud Enterprise service last April, allowing customers to rent virtual servers on an hourly basis.

At the time, TestPro, which has used Rational software for more than a decade, was reviewing its service contracts after having moved from data centres in Western Australia, Canberra and Sydney.

Marchant said the company reviewed its contracts every 12 to 18 months.

The company, which tests ERP, web-based and custom-built applications on behalf of organisations in the financial services, retail and government sectors, picked SmartCloud for the “best mix of price and performance”.

It spun up a virtual Windows 2003 server and two Windows 2008 servers in IBM’s Singapore data centre within one week, and decommissioned its Dell eight-way server and two HP G4 servers two weeks later.

Besides being cheaper, Marchant said the public cloud also allowed TestPro to respond more quickly to clients’ demands, spinning up new servers for projects in 20 minutes instead of days.

He did not expect offshore servers to be an issue for TestPro’s clients, since it did not need to move clients’ data to test their applications.

Marchant acknowledged that TestPro did not conduct detailed analysis of other cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, but did not expect lock-in to be an issue should the firm decide to move off SmartCloud.

“It would take us the same amount of time to move off [IBM] as to move on them,” he expected.

“We’re not scared of moving, but – like a mobile phone service – you don’t just pick up your phone and move carriers every couple of months to save a few dollars.”

Source:http://www.itnews.com.au/News/289177,software-tester-moves-to-offshore-cloud.aspx

Guidance Software Inc. (NASDAQ:GUID), the World Leader in Digital Investigations™, today announced a new version of its EnCase® eDiscovery software with the ability to collect electronically stored information (ESI) from more cloud-based data services and a new collected data re-use feature for searching evidence collected for previous cases.

“With the proliferation of end points and data storage locations, and increasingly, the cloud, enterprises today face a significant risk of not finding relevant ESI they are required to produce for a case”
The company made the announcement at LegalTech New York 2012 (Jan. 30 – Feb. 1) and will have the software on display at booth #310.

EnCase eDiscovery is the technology and market leader for legal hold, collection, processing and analysis, first-pass review and early case assessment. The new capabilities are available in EnCase eDiscovery v4.4 and help corporate IT and legal teams to confidently assert that they have searched all of the potentially relevant ESI in their possession, custody or control.

The Collected Data Re-use (CDR) feature allows e-discovery teams to search already collected evidence residing in an EnCase Logical Evidence File (LEF) from a previous matter. This reduces legal risk, cuts e-discovery collection time and reduces the impact on custodians.

EnCase eDiscovery also has a new connector framework that adds direct data collection from more than 30 leading email archives and content repositories from vendors such as IBM. Also included is support for optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from image files and PDFs and index them along with other collected data. This expands the company’s near de-duplication feature to compare text extracted from image files via OCR with other text files.

The ability to collect from cloud sources means EnCase eDiscovery can collect ESI from the widest range of desktops, laptops, servers, tablets, mobile phones, enterprise repositories, cloud services and other sources. New in v4.4 is support for all IMAP and POP3 Internet email services such as Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, in addition to existing support for Microsoft Office 365 online document service. The software also collects from Microsoft SharePoint servers.

“With the proliferation of end points and data storage locations, and increasingly, the cloud, enterprises today face a significant risk of not finding relevant ESI they are required to produce for a case,” said Alex Andrianopoulos, Guidance Software vice president of marketing. “This release reinforces EnCase eDiscovery’s leadership position and demonstrates our commitment to reduce cost and mitigate legal risk for in-house teams.”

EnCase eDiscovery 4.4 will be generally available in March 2012 from Guidance Software sales force and its resellers worldwide.

Source:http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20120131005555/en/EnCase-eDiscovery/cloud-based-data-services/collected-data-re-use