BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM recently announced new offerings to provide organizations with analytics capabilities to make better use of their archived information and improve business processes.

The new offerings support IBM's unified archiving strategy, called IBM Smart Archive, and are designed to help clients use content analytics and data discovery to determine which information is necessary to retain and archive, eliminating a major obstacle many clients have experienced in past archiving projects.

As a result of data growth, legal discovery requirements, regulatory compliance, and increasingly complex infrastructures, the need for information archiving is rapidly increasing. With these growing requirements for retention of information, organizations are struggling to determine what information they have, what to keep and what to discard.

The new offerings unify and simplify content, email and data collection and classification in a comprehensive approach, enabling multiple archiving models, including traditional on premise software, cloud services and hybrid options. With this offering, IBM is providing clients with the flexibility to choose between - or combine – delivery options to archive information that continues to grow within their organization.

"As our clients deal with the reality of budgetary constraints, they are realizing that keeping everything is not a workable strategy," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. "To deal with growing volumes of information, clients need to retain only what they need. IBM is helping clients do this with a comprehensive set of software, hardware and service offerings, that will help ensure that critical information is properly retained."

"With the volume of ticket sale transaction records and documents growing, we knew that we needed a 'universal archiving backbone' to manage, control and analyze all of our content," said Pascal Le Borgne, archiving project manager, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fers Français. "IBM is helping us to create a simple search and retrieval system for virtually all types of information."