Actiance solution on IBM Cloud and Watson APIs keeps business communications compliant and secure

Actiance solution on IBM Cloud and Watson APIs keeps business communications compliant and secure

Actiance, Inc. is on a mission to enable the security, management and compliance of unified communications, Web 2.0 and social media channels for corporate customers worldwide.  With IBM Cloud as a key partner and enabler, Actiance helps support and manage more than 500 million daily conversations across 80 communications channels. Customers include the top 10 U.S., top 5 Canadian, top 8 European, and top 3 Asian banks. A key Actiance advantage is that its platforms help its customers stay ahead of compliance and uncover patterns and relationships hidden within their data, so they can be more proactive and less reactive.

Compliance complexities with social and digital media

Due to transformation in financial services and growing regulatory requirements, such as GDPR companies must capture and make available their electronic communications more than ever before.

“The transition from capturing email to capturing various kinds of social media is difficult,” said Barry Ruditzky, Senior Vice President of Business Development. “Everyone is trying to use a growing spectrum of social media for business development but from an Actiance point of view, all the existing on-premises archives that are available from companies like HP, Veritas, and EMC are simply not designed for the scale and type of communication we are seeing today,” said Ruditsky.

How to offload the burden

Given the scale and importance of these new communication channels, many companies are only too happy to offload the burden of managing an archive to a company like Actiance that offers a cloud-based solution option. “It is much easier than deploying and managing it themselves,” said Ruditsky. Delivering its capabilities to large, demanding customers and doing it globally and reliably required an exceptional cloud partner: a role that IBM filled easily, Ruditsky said.

Alcatraz, the company’s next generation cloud-based archive, enhances eDiscovery processes by leveraging its TrueCompliance™ content collection capabilities to meet new Federal Rule of Evidence 902(14) standards, while accounting for all aspects of communication events, including virtual room logins, emoticons, ‘like’ events, share events, file transfers, wiki/blog posts, and real-time edits and deletions.  “We have evolved as the market has evolved to offer new solutions using cloud-based technology to provide rich, highly scalable infrastructure,” said Ruditsky.

Differentiation with IBM Cloud and IBM Watson

The relationship between Actiance and IBM has been rich, complex, and bi-directional, noted Ruditsky. “IBM resells our solutions and we buy IBM software and cloud services to run our services, so it goes both ways,” he explained.  The Actiance Vantage product offering is also resold and OEMed by IBM to integrate with IBM Connections and IBM Sametime.

“We also work closely with the IBM Watson team. The starting point is the Alcatraz content store with its rich set of APIs. We have all the social media, email, and IM content inside Alcatraz and now we are working with Watson to unlock that,” said Ruditsky. One of IBM’s solutions helps companies prevent financial crimes and implement anti-money-laundering.  Alcatraz is where content comes together by leveraging Watson to analyze and figure out trends.

“We felt having IBM Cloud gave us tremendous credibility; they are trusted or actually embedded in most large banks,” he said. “It made a lot of sense to partner with them on the largest accounts where they had strong customer relations,” he added.

What’s in store for the future?

Actiance is based in Redwood City, CA, and recently began a merger with Smarsh, a company with a similar vision and complementary products.  “As we combine with Smarsh, between us we will have a lot of customers in oil and gas and more specifically around energy trading: there is that whole financial subsegment within oil and gas,” noted Ruditsky.