Tumbleweed Communications positiver kommentar im Forbes-der kommende Star? - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[nete]

gestern nachbörslich kam vom Forbes ein sehr positiver Kommentar über Tumbleweed Communications


http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/021120/toshredandprotect_3.htmlForbes Magazine
To Shred And Protect
Wednesday November 20, 4:48 pm ET
By Erika Brown


Incriminating e-mails have become a litigator`s favorite tool. New software promises to help companies protect themselves from nasty lawsuits--no matter what side of the law they are on.
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An e-mail helped seal the tragic fate of Arthur Andersen. Candid e-mails from equity analyst Henry Blodget were used by New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer to push Merrill Lynch into a $100 million settlement for allegedly misleading investors. And Jack Grubman`s heads-up e-mails to WorldCom executives play a role in regulators` probe of Salomon Smith Barney.

E-mail, the pesky productivity tool, suddenly is every company`s minefield. Businesses generate 13 billion e-mails a day, according to IDC. In less time than it takes to think of what to say, e-mail is gone--and then it is all but impossible to shred. E-mails leave a trail on hard drives, servers and backup tapes, and you never know who might have been "blind" copied.

David Furbush, a securities litigator and partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in Palo Alto, Calif., says every one of his cases includes at least one e-mail as evidence. "Each case boils down to a small number of sound bites. Inevitably, some of them are e-mails where somebody was annoyed, frustrated or tired and wrote something thoughtlessly," he says.

Companies are caught between the urge to destroy all embarrassing missives and the need, more than ever before, to preserve any sensitive digital scraps and confine them inside a firm`s walled garden. The stakes are rising. The new Sarbanes-Oxley Act makes destroying or attempting to destroy documents related to a federal investigation a crime punishable by up to 20 years in jail. And, as Arthur Andersen learned only too well, the act of destroying evidence in anticipation of a lawsuit can lead a jury to the conclusion that the information would have been damning.

Now a handful of software outfits promise to help navigate the e-mail minefield and reduce the chances of a loose-lipped rogue employee bringing a company down. One software package equips executives with Mission: Impossible powers that make e-mails self-destruct in an hour, a day or in two weeks. Another dictates which workers can read, copy or print an e-mail--and which ones can`t. Still others sniff e-mails for banned phrases to prevent risky notes from sneaking out. They can even search for words in context (the word "breast" is okay if it`s near the word "chicken," but not otherwise). The key players in this sector are Authentica , IBM`s (NYSE:IBM - News) Lotus, Omniva Policy Systems, Marshal Software and Tumbleweed Communications (NasdaqNM:TMWD - News) .

Smart companies start by finding out what lurks in their e-mail servers long before plaintiff lawyers ever show up. The Food & Drug Administration, John Hancock and Metropolitan Life all use software from Tumbleweed, based in Redwood City, Calif., to screen thousands of e-mails a day. Its software stands sentry between employees and their corporate firewall, sifting through e-mails and attachments for words that fall within the danger zone. Notes "infected" with banned words are quarantined, blocked or rerouted to the boss.

Tumbleweed can let banks prohibit e-mails between analysts and brokers or encrypt messages from the research department. "Customers joke that Eliot Spitzerdoubles as our chief marketing officer," boasts Jeffrey C. Smith, Tumbleweed`s chairman.

Air Liquide America , the U.S. unit of a French gas company, takes encryption much further with software from Omniva, based in San Francisco. Omniva wraps e-mails in 128-bit encryption, a supersecure level of code that has yet to be cracked. Omniva`s servers store the unique software key needed to decrypt each e-mail. Every time a recipient tries to open one of those e-mails, his company`s server contacts Omniva`s servers to ask permission to unlock the code and read the e-mail. Senders can set a date to terminate the keys, rendering e-mails permanently garbled, the equivalent of shredding. Air Liquide decided to retain purchase orders for 6 years and contracts for 15. Everything else gets deleted after 90 days to avoid headaches and free up storage.

If a lawsuit gets filed or a federal investigation is launched, companies can hit Omniva`s "red button." It blocks the deletion of all decryption keys, essentially ceasing all shredding. Anything shredded prior to that is gone forever. Omniva helps enforce a company`s document retention policies by overriding individual requests to delete, and filing away e-mails as long as the company dictates. "We`re not just deleting," insists Kumar Sreekanti, Omniva`s chief executive. "Our goal is to keep the honest people honest."

With a few clicks, an executive also can prevent recipients from copying or printing a confidential note. Omniva can paste a transparent image over the e-mail`s code. If someone tries to copy or print the message, a blank page comes out instead. "We help organizations comply with regulations automatically so they don`t have to rely on people to do it," says Sreekanti.

Some fairly paranoid organizations, including the CIA, FBI and the U.S. House of Representatives, use software from Authentica, based in Waltham, Mass. Rebecca Burr, director of marketing analysis at Xilinx, a chipmaker in SanJose,Calif., is buying Authentica software. Authentica`s MailRecall product would let her render unreadable an old e-mail and replace it with a new one, even after it has been sent and opened. She will be able to quash an e-mail with an old pricing scale and send a new one in its place. MailRecall can also make sure an e-mail never makes it outside the walls of the company. "It would be my worst nightmare if the competition knew our product strategy or had our pricing books," she says.

Even as e-mail problems get solved, bosses now also have to worry about instant messaging services (see related story). Brokers and traders at Thomas Weisel Partners in San Francisco were using their own personal AOL, MSN and Yahoo IM accounts to share market data. In July 2001 Pamela Housley, director of compliance, shut them down. She worried the messages could be considered a correspondence under certain regulations, thereby forcing her to keep them. "Nothing was being managed," she says.

Two months later, after employees begged to get IM back, Housley installed software from FaceTime of Foster City, Calif. FaceTime feeds all the brokers` IM sessions through a server that screens for phrases such as "guaranteed" or "internal use only," and sends potentially offending chat to compliance officers. "If we see something wrong, we`ll make sure it doesn`t happen again," she says.

Drug giant Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY - News) learned firsthand of the hazards of runaway e-mail. In June 2001 an employee e-mailed 669 users of its antidepressant, Prozac, to inform them the company was ending its online pill-reminder service. The employee neglected to send the e-mails by blind copy, so each recipient could see the names and e-mail addresses of everyone else on the list. The Federal Trade Commission charged Lilly with violating its privacy policy. As part of a settlement, Lilly agreed in January to rewrite its own software to automatically cloak addresses in bulk e-mails. Lilly got off easy. A new federal law punishes health care providers that leak patient data while claiming their systems are secure with up to five years in jail or a $100,000 fine.

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