Hundreds of customer and partners worldwide have adopted IBM’s Smart Archive strategy to make better use of their archived information and meet their regulatory and compliance demands, the company announced last week.

IBM’s Smart Archive strategy is a comprehensive, unified, integrated and information-aware archiving strategy. Through a set of IBM software, hardware and service solutions, customers can optimize and unify ingestion of multiple information types; can take advantage of a flexible and secure infrastructure including support of traditional on-premise, preconfigured appliance, cloud service and hybrid delivery models; and can leverage integrated compliance, records management, analytics and eDiscovery capabilities.

BB&T is one of the nation's largest financial-holding companies with more than 30,000 employees and approximately 1,800 locations in 12 states and Washington, D.C. The full-service financial institution offers a wide range of consumer and commercial banking, securities brokerage, asset management, mortgage and insurance services. BB&T selected an IBM Smart Archive solution to help it migrate regulatory-required data from the infrastructure of an acquired bank. The data was spread across the acquired bank's infrastructure and included Microsoft Exchange Servers, SharePoint, file servers and about 6,000 desktops.

"Working with IBM, we were able to successfully migrate 35 TB of critical data and 200 million objects. The data needed to be moved into BB&T's infrastructure to comply with regulations and this needed to happen in a very tight time frame," said Paul Johnson, CIO, BB&T. "The IBM Smart Archive solution, coupled with strong IBM subject matter expertise support, allowed us to meet our aggressive schedule for moving the data. Not meeting the deadline would have meant additional costs for BB&T that ranged in the millions of dollars."

Keystone Distribution (UK) Ltd, a leading food services supplier that primarily serves McDonald's restaurants, is using IBM’s Smart Archive strategy to manage and automate the flow of archived information and reduce paper costs. Keystone distributes a broad range of products, from beverages to French fries and cleaning supplies.

Keystone Distribution has a high volume of email traffic with its customers, which needs to be retained to comply with their corporate governance standards. Increasing volumes were creating untenable growth in email storage requirements. “Thanks to IBM and Portal Partnership, we now have a platform that has reduced our storage requirements, consolidated and simplified our e-mail architecture, and provided a reliable, streamlined solution for compliance and legal discovery,” said Declan McGuire, Director of Supply Chain and Information Systems, Keystone Distribution.

Partners worldwide are also turning to IBM to collaborate and build solutions based on IBM Smart Archive strategy. IBM business partner Lighthouse worked with Babcock Power Inc. -- a global, multi-product, privately owned energy and environmental services and systems enterprise -- to implement an effective archiving system.

"We are a satisfied customer who utilizes an IBM solution implemented by Lighthouse Computer Services to help us store, control and locate critical data in our electronic storage systems," said Keith Taylor, Director of IT Operations, Babcock Power, Inc.

See a Lighthouse Computer Services podcast that shows how IBM Smart Archive is driving business opportunities for them and their customers.

To continue its investment in solutions based on the Smart Archive strategy, IBM is also announcing delivery of a new hardware, software and services offering that delivers end-to-end archive and eDiscovery for email and files that is easily expandable to other content types. The IBM Information Archive for Email, Files, and eDiscovery offering is a pre-installed and pre-configured solution that accelerates implementation of an end-to-end archive and eDiscovery solution from weeks to days. The new solution leverages IBM’s experience and best practices in customer archiving deployments, simplifying implementation and providing quick time to value. It is built on a highly scalable, secure, high performance infrastructure with the flexibility to meet multiple requirements in a single solution. As a result, customers can improve their ability to locate, collect, organize, analyze, trust and leverage information across the organization.

“IBM delivers an archiving solution based on its Smart Archive strategy that not only meets a specific archiving need today, such as e-mail or eDiscovery, but also serves as the foundation for a rich, robust long-term multi-purpose archiving solution. That is in contrast to many of its competitors’ where archives are single purpose such as eDiscovery alone or limited in some way,” said David Hill of Mesabi Group.

“We’ve seen great momentum with customer adoption of the IBM Smart Archive strategy to date,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president, products and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. “Because of data growth, legal discovery requirements, and regulatory compliance, the need for information archiving will continue to increase. Our mandate is to provide clients with the flexibility to choose between -- or combine – hybrid delivery options to archive information that continues to grow within their organization.”

For more information on the IBM Smart Archive Strategy visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/smart-archive/

For more information on IBM ECM visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/content-management, or Twitter