Information at Your Fingertips

Information at your fingertips was the promise. With a mere click of the mouse, documents, reports, memos, and electronic mail - in short, anything and everything created over a history of time would be quickly and easily accessible. The reality has been far different. While businesses, collect and store entire libraries worth of documents, hunting down any one of them has often been like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Three and a half year-old Mimosa Systems of Santa Clara, Calif. has designed a solution to archive and manage electronic mail, the communications vehicle of choice for today’s businesses and an important record of how companies conduct business. Mimosa’s NearPoint software works with Microsoft’s popular Exchange servers and allows companies to capture e-mail, archive it to lower cost storage, and organize it into easily searched information repositories. Mimosa’s automated search feature can hunt through years worth of stored e-mail to find specific documents, a process that at one time required manually browsing through cartridges of back-up tapes. A typical Mimosa-based legal discovery search can be completed in a few minutes or hours.

E-mail, instant messaging, blogs and other collaborations represent the third wave in enterprise software, which began with the automation of so-called back office functions like finance and manufacturing, and eventually encompassed front office departments like sales and marketing.

Mimosa founder and chief executive T. M. Ravi estimates that 90 percent of the information being generated by businesses today falls into the category of “unstructured” data - in other words documents that have not been formatted for the rigid requirements of an electronic database. Of that, a significant portion is in the form of electronic mail, a by-product of an information revolution that encouraged greater collaboration within organizations and beyond their walls. “The corporate decision-making process used to be command and control,” Ravi explains. “Today decisions are much more distributed across the organization and made by employees.”
 
Organizing business data is tricky: much of it what is generated is proprietary; some of it is appropriate for some eyes, but not for others. Complicating matters, data resides in different repositories and in different locations. At the same time, keeping complete and accessible electronic records has become essential as companies are under greater pressure to demonstrate that business is being conducted legally and ethically. E-mail represents the most important record of corporate decision-making.

Ravi, a former marketing vice-president at Computer Associates and a veteran of two previous startups, saw an opportunity being missed by the established players in the enterprise software market. Oracle, SAP and their competitors had failed to recognize the need to store and manage unstructured information like e-mail. And, he realized that low-cost storage made retaining years of content practical. Mimosa’s solution has been built to be an archiving platform that supports legal discovery, end-user search and business continuity.

Today, Mimosa sells its software to chief legal counsel in large and mid-sized businesses concerned with maintaining repositories of easily searched electronic records to meet legal requirements and reduce risk. Ravi is also seeing early signs that line of business managers are more interested in extracting business intelligence from stored content as a way to better understand how business processes may be improved.

Among Mimosa’s first investors were David Marquardt of August Capital, the legendary venture capitalist who funded Microsoft Corp., and Rajiv Motwani, the Stanford University professor who was an early investor in Google. To date, Mimosa has raised $34.1 million including a significant investment from the Mayfield Fund. Managing director Navin Chaddha sits on Mimosa’s board. “E-mail archiving has the potential to be an enormous market,” Chaddha says.

In 2006, its first full year of revenue, Mimosa signed 93 customers including Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), Pacific Gas & Electronic, Sears and Virtua Health. Mimosa is extending its reach by bringing on Asian and European resellers and Ravi projects the company will be profitable by end of 2008.

Chaddha likes to call major market shifts tsunamis after the giant waves that sweep all that comes before it.