There's a $1.9bn bun fight going on right now with EMC and Netapps at war over who will buy Data Domain. It's all got a bit messy with Netapp saying that EMC's latest hostile bid raises antitrust concerns. EMC came back with a good retort and the batting back and forth certainly makes interesting viewing from the sidelines... it's almost good enough to be on centre court at Wimbledon.
So what's the fuss about? De-duplication, that's what.
De-duplication is Data Domain's core expertise and is all about trying to identify all the duplicate versions of the same document or file that exists in a company's IT infrastructure and reducing it to as few copies as possible. So as you can imagine, de-duplication is a technology that brings real space saving - and therefore cost saving - benefits to IT infrastructures which hits the mark for most CxO's in this day and age.
However, De-dupe technology isn't cheap and can be expensive to implement. Additionally, it's a reaction to processes and applications that create duplication rather than a solution to the cause of the duplication - a bit like the doctor treating the symptoms rather than working to kill the bug that caused them in the first place.
For example, email attachments are one cause of duplication. The attachments -- ending in .pdf, .doc, .ppt, etc., already exist in the IT infrastructure, only to be duplicated within the email environment as soon as you click on the paperclip in your email app. It appears again in the redundant email infrastructure, then again in the backup of the email system and so the snowball grows.
Both IntraLinks Exchanges and IntraLinks Courier allow sensitive and commercially valuable documents to be exchanged or sent direct from the original instance of the file. I guess you could call this "Proactive De-duplication" and given that it's available almost instantly in a SaaS model with military grade security and complete compliance auditability, surely it's got to be worth looking at if reducing cost and complexity are your watchwords.
So, should we be proactively gunning for the causes or reactively treating the symptoms?