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Mimosa NearPoint Makes Its Mark on Matthews International |
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Founded in 1850, Pittsburgh-based Matthews International is one of the oldest major American public companies. Today, Matthews comprises two business segments: Brand Solutions, which provides various merchandising, packaging, and marking solutions designed to help companies bring products to market, and Memorialization, which produces a range of funereal and memorial products. The company generates approximately $700 million in revenue and has more than doubled its revenue in the past five years. Through internal growth and strategic acquisitions, the company has expanded its presence around the world, with operations in 13 countries over four continents.
Matthews currently has about 1,400 PC users, 350 Mac users, and more than 150 mobile phones, all requiring email management. “We found that email storage data was proliferating at a rate of 3-5 GB per day, and that full system backups were requiring 17-20 hours,” says Ryan Shipkowski, Matthews International’s network administrator. “Not only were both figures far too high, but they also represented inefficiencies and a high cost for mainframe capacity.”
Matthews International made a strategic decision to identify and install the best email archiving solution to satisfy five main requirements. The company needed to:
Matthews International selected Mimosa NearPoint to address all of its email archiving needs. Delivering archiving, eDiscovery, search and retrieval, disaster recovery, and storage management in one integrated solution, NearPoint provides the flexibility and protection Matthews was looking for. In addition, NearPoint offers easy deployment and helps ensure companies meet today’s stringent compliance requirements. “We were able to address all of our objectives with the Mimosa solution and have been extremely pleased with every aspect of the NearPoint implementation and operation,” says Shipkowski.
The Mimosa archiving software optimized eDiscovery and email management for Matthews. Continuous Application Shadowing captures complete Exchange mailbox information, as well as email stored offline in PST files and all email content found in public folders. With the easy-to-use self-service search tools in NearPoint, end users can quickly retrieve their archived data without IT assistance. And auditors and legal staff can now retrieve all messages containing key search terms within an hour or two, which saves time and helps ensure the company meets regulatory requirements. According to Shipkowski, “We have been able to proactively satisfy compliance requirements with extreme ease and speed, and the alternative could be a hugely expensive operational exercise.”
Using NearPoint, Matthews International administrators defined policies that enabled mailboxes on Exchange Server to be extended to the NearPoint server using parameters for message size, age, and mailbox quota. This policy significantly reduced the company’s data storage requirements. “Our pre-archive storage requirements were more than 250 GB and escalating exponentially; now we’re down below 150 GB, and our requirement for storage is actually decreasing,” notes Shipkowski.
Matthews International chose NearPoint not only to solve several ongoing issues but also to help facilitate future upgrades. Like many other companies, Matthews is preparing to migrate from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007 as soon as the first Service Pack becomes available. “We’re confident that Mimosa will make the migration very easy and straightforward, just as it has done with previous migrations,” says Shipkowski.
“NearPoint has already paid for itself by reducing legal discovery time. We definitely made the right decision in going with NearPoint.”
With the NearPoint rapid eDiscovery capabilities, legal staff can quickly perform sophisticated search and discovery across multiple mailboxes, retrieving data from email, calendar entries, contacts, notes, offline PST files, and more. So comprehensive information searches that were once manual and took days or even weeks now take only hours, enabling key staff to focus on the business. And optimized data retrieval ensures the company is in compliance with SOX and other regulatory requirements.
Using NearPoint, employees now have seamless self-service access to their archived data, enabling them to find potentially lost or deleted messages. This frees up IT staff to manage the network and systems while empowering employees to manage and retrieve their own data.
Since the deployment, Matthews International reports that Mimosa NearPoint has significantly reduced email storage requirements and greatly facilitated message retrieval for the company’s 3,800 employees. NearPoint has enabled the company to reduce storage requirements on its Exchange Server by nearly half by migrating or extending attachments based on policies of age, document size, or mailbox size.
The Mimosa solution also provides automated, application-intelligent disaster recovery, which reliably protects Matthews’ Exchange information through non-invasive, continuous application shadowing. This process preserves the consistency and integrity of Exchange data and enables one-click full email data and service recovery when needed.
Overall, Matthews International is very pleased with all aspects of NearPoint and the great ROI they’ve received so far. Shipkowski concludes, “NearPoint has already paid for itself by reducing legal discovery time. We definitely made the right decision in going with NearPoint.”
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