Collaborating on Compliance: Smarsh and Actiance unite through merger

Smarsh, a provider of communications capture, archiving, e-discovery and monitoring solutions, today announced the completion of its merger with Actiance. The merger unites two industry-leading companies, combining their product suites to cover an unrivaled breadth of communication channels. Both companies will come under the Smarsh name and brand.

Smarsh has also launched its new Connected Suite, a product offering that includes Connected Capture, Connected Archive and Connected Apps. As communication technology has become increasingly complex, companies need the ability to seamlessly collect, store and analyse vast amounts of data. Moreover, with the introduction of Mifid II and GDPR, companies are facing a much more challenging regulatory environment which can result in substantial fines if this data is not stored and processed intelligently. The Connected Suite is specifically designed to ensure that companies are able to meet these modern business challenges.

Smarsh’s CEO, Brian Cramer, said: “Smarsh simplifies the process of communications capture, archiving and monitoring at the scale needed to handle today’s data volumes. This allows our clients to focus on growth, rather than data compliance. Globally, we serve more than 6,500 customers with specialised solutions for financial services firms, government agencies and companies in other regulated industries.

“These companies are all under immense pressure from regulatory requirements and the demands of processing vast amounts of communications data. Smarsh’s product suite gives clients unparalleled capabilities in managing their flow of data across a wide range of communication platforms. Alongside our global partners such as IBM, Cisco and AT&T, we also have the subject matter expertise needed to navigate the modern business world.”

By supporting the capture and archiving of more than 80 content types, Smarsh’s clients are able to integrate collaboration tools like Slack or Facebook for Work without worrying about the typical compliance concerns. The new product suite will ensure that clients can operate in the safe knowledge that their compliance, risk and governance goals are always met.

“Actiance and Smarsh have both been innovative players in the capture and archiving space for many years. Led by a strong, unified leadership team, their organisations and product specialties are a great match,” said Michael Osterman, Principal Analyst, Osterman Research. “The new Connected Suite features the best of both worlds — the synergy of both companies enables Smarsh to offer a set of solutions that meets the specific needs of regulated organisations of all sizes.”

The Connected Suite

The Smarsh Connected Suite is a new product framework leveraging the familiar, best-of-breed technologies from both Actiance and Smarsh. The Archiving Platform from Smarsh and the Actiance suite (Alcatraz, Vantage and Socialite), both recently recognised as 2018 Trend-Setting Products, benefit from the convergence of each other’s unique capabilities, as well as the new level of scale, development and investment resources from the combined organisation. Components of the Smarsh Connected Suite, with specialised packages for financial services and government customers, include:

Connected Capture

Enables customers to reliably and efficiently capture electronic communications for ingestion into the search-ready Connected Archive or other existing archives
Features the most robust and complete set of capture capabilities available today, with content captured continuously, in its native format, directly from the source channels with full conversational context preserved
Supports more than 80 channels of electronic communication spanning email, IM/collaboration, social media, mobile/text messaging and voice

Connected Archive

Provides ingestion, search, review, reporting and export capabilities universally across all supported content types
Offers multi-tenant and private, single-tenant cloud-based deployment options designed to meet each customer’s unique volume, customisation and privacy requirements
Preserves full conversational context across all communication channels, and stores content immutably in its original format, providing valuable context for supervision and e-discovery effectiveness

Connected Apps

Supervision: Designed for customers with regulatory obligations to conduct ongoing monitoring of their organisation’s electronic communications. Features an enhanced team-based review workflow, enabling customers to reveal and mitigate risk quickly and to streamline compliance initiatives.
Discovery: Designed to reduce the time, cost and effort required to collect, analyze and produce specific content for e-discovery and investigations
Control: Leveraging Actiance’s active compliance technology, the Control App provides channel-by-channel feature sets (moderation, pre-review, blocking, altering) enabling customers to establish and enforce usage policies, and take action on content before it becomes problematic

“As business becomes more social, mobile and collaborative, companies are trying to keep pace with changing customer preferences while working to solve their regulatory compliance challenges,” said Anthony West, Smarsh’s CTO. “With the Smarsh Connected Suite, organisations can choose how they respond to the changing dynamics of their customers and employees, enable their business to maximise the power of the communications channels of today and tomorrow, and proactively manage the associated risk to better protect their organisation.”

The combined organisation now employs more than 600 employees worldwide, with increased engineering support, coverage and capacity. The company has also launched a new website which provides additional insight about Smarsh and their new product suite. For more information, please visit www.smarsh.com.