“Explosive, unstructured data growth is forcing IT leaders to rethink data management. IT, data and storage managers use file analysis to deliver insight into information about the data, enabling better management and governance to improve business value, reduce risk and lower management cost.”

The research recommends that “Organizations should review the scope of their unstructured data problems by using file analysis (FA) tools to understand where dark unstructured data resides and who has access to it.”

With our upcoming product release powered by our experienced partner network, Active Navigation offers a powerful suite of end-to-end information discovery and transformation capabilities that clearly differentiate us from our competitors in the market. Why not give us a call to find out more?

The main highlights of this Release are:

• An all new Container Report which replaces the old ‘Folder Usage’ report to provide hierarchical and structural context to index results so you can easily locate interesting containers wherever they may be.
• Our new heat facility which allows results from a chosen field to be overlaid on a Container Report so you can see where ‘hot’ files can be found in relation to the rest of the network hierarchy. Heat overlays include the ability to drill into field reports for more detail.
• Some smart tweaks and improved presentation for all reports, including no-value filtering and back navigation, makes reporting much easier to use. Further, this release no longer uses Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, reducing our deployed SQL footprint.
• For file shares, indexing is now possible at server level. This means a big reduction in the number of indexes needed, reducing administration overhead and improving usability.

Release 4.2.5 and documentation is available to customers and partners through our support portal at support.activenavigation.com or contact us for me details.

GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, GOLD COAST, 13^th November 2012 - Information governance and legacy content management company, Active Navigation has appointed data industry expert Michael Cawsey to the role of Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific, joining its executive management team.  Michael’s role will be to head up the company’s new Asia Pacific (APAC) regional operations from Australia, which will include managing key customer accounts, such as Rio Tinto. His appointment marks the launch of Active Navigation’s presence in APAC, which complements its continued expansion into the North American market with CEO Peter’ Baumann’s relocation to Reston, Virginia, USA.

Michael has 25 years of experience in software sales and marketing, where he has helped businesses to deliver against aggressive targets in the competitive growth markets across the Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.  He has held senior management roles at a number of companies including Opentext, KOFAX and TIBCO.

“We are delighted to have Michael join the Active Navigation team to head up our operations in the Asia Pacific,” said CEO Peter Baumann.  “Mike has intimate knowledge of and experience in the Australian software market and is therefore well placed to help grow our business across the region.”

“Joining the Active Navigation team is a terrific opportunity,” said Michael Cawsey.  “I look forward to the challenge of expanding the business in the rapidly growing Asia Pac region and ensuring the delivery of quality content for Big Data to our growing customer base.”

Michael will be based in Sydney, but will also work closely with the team at Active Navigation’s APAC headquarters in Melbourne.

• New keyword and phrase extraction capability with synonym support.
• Multi-value fields to improve the scope of metadata extraction and sensitive data identification.
• Scoring for calculated fields to enable you to pinpoint high value or high risk files more quickly.
• Improved indexing options for better management of large file analysis.

These powerful new capabilities will make a real difference to sensitive data audit and migration projects for customers and partners alike. We will now be moving on to some new reporting improvements to deliver exiting new visualizations around Christmas or the New Year.

Information governance software company Active Navigation has announced the relocation of its chief executive officer to Reston, Virginia. Peter Baumann has led the worldwide growth of Active Navigation and is making the move from the UK with his family to spearhead the company’s next phase of expansion in North America.

Peter’s goal is to drive and accelerate the US uptake of Active Navigation’s ground-breaking technology, which has already delivered significant benefits to its customers such as Sallie Mae, Rio Tinto, BAE Systems, US Army and CENTCOM. Active Navigation has worked with established partners including PWC, IMC and Gimmal to bring customers improved governance of unstructured information, including the avoidance of duplicate, inappropriate or obsolete data and the risks associated with stray Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Mike Alsup, founder of Gimmal commented, “We have worked with Active Navigation for several years. Peter Baumann is moving to the US to help the company achieve critical mass in this market in time for the SharePoint 2013 launch. We welcome him and look forward to further collaboration in the integration of Active Navigation’s file share migration technologies and our SharePoint governance tools.”

Peter commented “Active Navigation’s ability to restore control of unstructured information is something every organization needs and the American market has shown time and time again its enthusiasm to adopt new technologies to achieve key objectives. Having established a presence in Virginia and the Federal market in the last couple of years I am excited to be joining our US team on the ground so we can maximize this fantastic opportunity.”

He went on “Big data enabled by cloud computing is the future, but without appropriate organization and governance, large organisations will flounder as they try to take advantage of it. It is too easy to become mired in runaway storage costs and unfathomable digital landfills, which will be to the significant detriment of newer technologies such as Microsoft’s SharePoint and Azure offerings.”

Sudhakar Shenoy, CEO of IMC, added, “Peter’s relocation shows the priority Active Navigation is giving to the North American market, which, as one of the company’s early partners here, we are enthusiastic about.”

Active Navigation has been selected by the Combined Arms Center (CAC) to help consolidate the content in its Warrior Reference Library  in preparation for its migration to SharePoint for the ongoing management of its data. The challenge is to reduce the amount of information saved on its storage area network, in order to allow data to be managed more effectively and to reduce ongoing costs.

CAC chose Active Navigation after a demonstration and pilot project that focused on metadata tagging a sample of 140GB (approximately 250,000 files) of its content to identify which data would be migrated and which would be removed. The results showed that acceptable accuracy in the tagging could be achieved in just 15 hours. A further evaluation found that completing the equivalent process manually for the 3 million files destined for SharePoint migration would have cost up to $20 million in labor and taken several years to complete.

Following the success of the pilot, Active Navigation’s methodology is now being used to roll out the program across CAC’s data centers, cleansing Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) data to help reduce content by up to 40% ahead of its move to SharePoint.  It will also provide a structure to help the organization to effectively maintain its data once the migration has taken place.

“We had spent more than two years searching for an efficient method of meta-tagging to facilitate the migration to SharePoint,” said Davin Knolton, Chief Information Officer of the Combined Armed Center. “Active Navigation came out as the clear leader in this niche market and has the capabilities to do everything that we require and more. The project with Active Navigation so far has been a great success and we look forward to continuing this collaborative effort in the future.”

“The process of managing unstructured content can be costly and time consuming, particularly if done manually, which can be a particular problem for large organizations,” said Peter Baumann, CEO of Active Navigation.  “Our solution is currently used by a number of government and defense bodies, so we fully appreciate the difficulties presented by sensitive data and the need to comply with legislation. Active Navigation presents a time and cost-effective solution to this growing problem. By enabling ongoing maintenance and data management, we help to arm organizations against future data problems.”

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Dr. Hilbert and his University of Southern California colleagues have estimated that there are currently about 600 exabytes of data stored on earth – and this figure is doubling every three years.   This acceleration in data accumulation basically comes down to the growing amounts of data generated by technology: computers, cell phones and other electronic devices.

If all of this information was held in books, the entire area of the US would be covered in 13 layers of them, literally drowning the country in data!  Dr Hilbert is quick to add, however, that all technology has a shelf life, so this information won’t be around or stored forever.  We still think a quick call to Active Navigation is in order – we could certainly help sort through the rubbish make sense of some of the mess!

For further data facts ranging from the fun to the downright obscure — have a listen yourself:

27th June 2012 – Information governance and legacy content management company, Active Navigation today announced that its CEO, Peter Baumann has received the Recovery Entrepreneur Award at the second annual ITC Enterprise Awards.

Peter was awarded the honour on 21st June at the gala awards dinner held in central London. The awards celebrate the achievements of the most successful entrepreneurs in the ITC Mentoring Programme which connects new IT-focused entrepreneurs with experienced mentors who are members of the ITC.

“The outstanding overall quality of this year’s entries demonstrates that the spirit of enterprise is alive and well in the UK,” said John O’Connell, chairman of the Information Technologists’ Company Awards. “It was a difficult decision for the judging panel. Award winners deserve all the accolades they will receive for being publicly acknowledged as leaders in their chosen field.”

“Being an entrepreneur is never an easy path, but I’ve enjoyed facing and overcoming the challenges of it — learning along the way.” said Peter Baumann. “Active Navigation’s growth and current success are reward enough for my role as CEO, but I’m thrilled to accept this award from the ITC. The support and acknowledgement from fellow entrepreneurs is truly an honour.”

Read the full press release…