Mimecast promises email intelligence boost

Mimecast is offering customers a new form of business intelligence

Email management firm Mimecast has developed technology that it claims will enable businesses to extract more value from staff emails.

Mimecast currently offers a software-as-a-service archiving system, which it touts as being able to locate emails up to 15 years old in seconds.

Peter Bauer, Mimecast's chief executive, explained that the firm is shifting some of its focus to unlocking the valuable corporate data stored in emails to give Mimecast customers a new form of business intelligence.

"It will show who in one company talks to whom in another and what information has been passed between them, such as all relevant emails, documents and press releases," he said.

"This will not only provide customers with a more client-centric view, but enable better decision making and business continuity. If someone leaves a company, it is important to give the person taking their place access to information previously sent from their business."

Mimecast will make the tracking technology available inside common applications such as Microsoft's SharePoint and Outlook from July. "It will be a very big launch for us," he said.

Bauer also spoke of plans to launch a technology that will allow firms to easily capture real-time information published about them on the web, such as from sites like Twitter.

"We have actually got all the infrastructure in place to collect all the information that exists on a business in the hemisphere and pull this data in, but the big challenge will be whether business users will allow their companies to access all this data they publish," said Bauer. "There are quite a few privacy questions that still need to be answered."