Marie: Growing volumes of electronic records are a fact of life for every organization. Add to that the 10,000+ regulations around the world that dictate retention, management, or privacy of those records, plus growing issues regarding litigation. As a result, we believe that within the next 3-5 years, every organization worldwide will need software assistance to enable them to manage their electronic records -- for operational reasons, to comply with regulations, to facilitate legal discovery as well as for broad risk management and mitigation reasons.

David: It sounds like your business is aimed at, well, helping businesses protect themselves from horror stories. Can you tell us a few horror stories to help us get some perspective on why this is such a concern?

Marie: Remember, this issue affects organizations of pretty much any size in every market sector worldwide. However, there are a few that have been heavily publicized in the past year. Let's start with the ongoing saga at Morgan Stanley.

Last year the company made headlines after being slapped with a multi-billion dollar judgment due, in part, to its inability to certify that it had turned over all relevant emails to the plaintiffs' lawyer. The judge in the case, frustrated at Morgan Stanley's repeated failure to comply with the discovery order, handed down a pre-trial ruling that effectively found the bank had conspired to "defraud" its former client.

And there's the now-infamous UBS Warburg v Zubulake case, in which UBS was ordered to pay Laura Zubulake $29.2 million in damages in a sexual discrimination case that involved destroyed or non-discoverable email.

And proving that this issue isn't limited to the commercial sector, in the current investigation of former White House staffer Lewis Libby, there are problems over the issue that certain emails can't be located.

David: We often hear people talking about the cost of storage, but isn't that old news? With a terabyte of storage costing less than a thousand dollars, isn't storage incredibly cheap?

Marie: Absolutely -- the price of storage has definitely come down and that's great news for users. But the issue here isn't storage, and just having a backup strategy wouldn't be enough to prevent some of the horror stories alluded to earlier. This issue has far more to do with the risk that the content contained in the storage devices generates. And even for organizations that believe they're not really affected by legislation or litigation, more storage means more overhead, which means longer backup cycles, which means more people.

There's also an additional point to consider: the content is stored for a reason, or a lot of reasons -- compliance, corporate governance, legal discovery, operational support, knowledge management, etc., and that content therefore needs to be completely and truly accessible. As those headline-making cases have shown, storage just is not the complete solution.

David: Notes has excellent data management and retrieval. How do you add value over the basic Notes offering?