Funny thing about customers – they will show you how your product(s) can be used in ways you never imagined.

This is a great stage to be in as a company as our technology is finding new problems to solve and our customers are getting huge value out of our ability to solve them without having to shop for something new.

We had a recent experience where one of our customers came to us with the need to control duplicate emails before archival and wanted to use our classification product to do so.

De-duplication has long been the turf of pure storage and archival companies and is not necessarily something we considered or thought of ourselves as a solution to fix. We are not focused on single-instance storage and optimization anymore than we want to be an archiving company, but the opportunity came up to be used as a piece of the solution to this problem and we were able to address it.

We were asked if we could help eliminate duplicate emails before they entered the archive. Their problem was that in a multiple MS Exchange Journal environment, the same message could end up in multiple Journals based on the recipient list creating what was estimated to be as much as 30% duplicate emails in the long-term archive.

They are a pretty large company and that amount of duplicates translates to terabytes of extra storage not to mention the retrieval headache of seeing the same message over and over again. They looked internally at what they had that could address this and contacted us and another vendor for proposals.

Sorry for MessageGate commercial here, but we were able to get this problem under control with a pretty simple classification rule designed to detect duplicate message IDs and were able to do so with limited additional hardware cost. The other solution *could* have done this but was disqualified based on the amount of iron needed for processing.

The reason I point this out is that scalability is touted by every enterprise software company out there. No one is going to tell you they can’t scale. Where the rubber meets the road is how, operationally, you scale.  Chasing performance with server count and claiming infinite software scalability without including the associated hardware and processing costs is not a way to endear yourself to an enterprise customer or win business.

As you acquire customers and grow a business, be prepared to be shown how your product(s) can be used to solve their pressing needs in many ways you never even considered and to be able to meet these new requirements with an attractive total cost of operation.