What's in a name? More than it seems for HP Records Manager 8, according to David Gould, Global Product Line Lead. IDM asked Gould for a detailed briefing on this major new update to a record-keeping stalwart, the first version since HP acquired the product from Australia's Tower Software in 2008 to eliminate a reference to the product's origins.

IDM: David, what was the reason to take the T out of TRIM after 5 years of ownership?

DG: Well, you know, that’s a great question, and at the end of the day, I think we’re much better at building really great software products as opposed to great names for products. But the reality is that we wanted to link it really closely to the HP brand.  I think it was important for us to solidify what was known as TRIM as kind of our lead strategic product. We also wanted to reflect the fact that we are taking technology from a couple of other products, blending it in and really I think this solution really is a product that’s focused beyond records.  

One of the themes that we had for our recent Information Governance Forum in Melbourne, where the product was announced, was the idea of transformation. What used to be known as a record 20 or 30 years ago is still a record, but there’s a lot more that becomes a record. So that’s one transformation.  Two, the people who are doing records management, especially the largest organisations in Australia, are really on the vanguard of transforming the way records are used.

Within Australian government agencies, and now within more and more commercial organisations, it’s part of a larger information governance initiative.  It’s not just about records itself, it’s how records contribute to business intelligence, how it contributes to compliance, and how you can use these solutions also to manage for cost.  So that’s the second piece.  

And the third piece is that we really transformed TRIM into a solution that is really focused not only on the hard core records manager but it’s also focused very much on the information worker, the people who are creating records, who are using records, who need records to do their job on a day in, day out basis.  And when you put all those three things together it’s time to retire and transform the name.  

We do have some guidelines at HP how we call things, and I would have liked to have come up with a more imaginative name that blends document management with records management.  We have some constraints on us and so HP Records Manager was what came off the assembly line.  

I think over time the delivery, the solution, the functional delivery, the use cases that are being employed by customers will drive the real meaning of the name, and clearly we’re committed to records, we’re committed to document management.  What we’re really committed to is information governance, and I think that when you put all those things together it was time to change the name, and that’s what we did.  It may not be the best name, but it is, we believe, the best information governance solution in the marketplace, simply because of its design and ability to solve a wide variety of use cases.

IDM: When HP TRIM 7 was released in February 2010 it was described as a document and records management product.  Now it’s been described as HP Records Manager, is that indicating some limitation in terms of its document management functionality?

DG: Let me make this very clear; exactly the opposite is true.  We are not only fully committed to document and records management, the document management pieces are a strategic part of our go-forward records management platform.  

When I came to HP in 2010 right after the TRIM 7 platform was announced, the direction the product was headed was into the ECM space, and the reality is that the world really didn’t need another ECM solution.

The fact is if you went into an ECM solution as opposed to a record and document management solution I think we were always destined to be in sixth or seventh place.  And HP as a company is not interested in having products that are sixth or seventh in market share, market brand, market awareness and all those things.  So the real goal of the solution is to be at the top of the list, and document management is an integral part of the product; it’s architected in the product, it is not a module. When you turn on HP Records Manager just like you turn on TRIM, it is a highly integrated solution.  

You can’t go in and say, “I’m turning off document management,” because document management is put into the product to facilitate the records capture, the content capture, and the process it takes to go from a piece of content to a piece of business information that has relevance and importance to a piece of content that’s managed for the long-term retention.  So document management is critical to the product, the workflow that’s baked into the product is critical to the product, and the records, the retention and disposition are critical to the product.

When you look at the use cases that are emerging we have so many customers outside of Australia using HP Records Manager much in the same way the original users of TRIM used it in Australia for both document and records management.  These are some of the largest companies in the world.  On the other hand the fact is that as a long-term manage retention defensible disposition use case that’s an increasingly important part of our go-to-market story, and we are beefing that up.  It’s how we integrate with SharePoint which is the leader in enterprise content management.  There’s no dispute on that.  We have built in a lot of functional capability around duplication management, single instancing, around how content is stored and managed on multiple tiers of storage.  So we are really enterprising this solution in a way that I think makes it stand out unique.  But clearly document management from our standpoint, make no mistake about it, it is not only in the product, it’s on a roadmap that will continue to be enhanced and developed.

IDM: In 2008 when HP acquired Tower Software it boasted 1000 customers with more than 780,000 users in 32 countries.  Can you update that figure for 2013?

DG: We now have over 1,500 customers worldwide and we’re either approaching or getting near, or just over the 1.5 million user mark.  We also have new market entries in countries such as India, Malaysia, Mauritius, Italy and also Brazil and Russia where the product is localised.  So there has been significant customer growth in terms of pure numbers.  

When you put all of our records management products together into HP RM like we’ve done we have over 1,800 customers globally with probably 1.8 million users.  So it’s a pretty significant footprint, and we’re pleased with the growth.  We’re having another good year.  I think what’s important for us is that the product is being used in many, many different kinds of use cases to when we acquired it from Tower when these things weren’t even conceived of. I is an integral part now of structured records management; there’s a lot of Australian agencies looking at how they can manage structured records with our solution.  There’s a lot of organisations, obviously using it for SharePoint integration which was introduced in 2010.  There’s a lot of organisations using it for application retirement.  There’s a much stronger linking between what we’re doing, and this is part of the transformation where records managers were pretty much a back-office operation.  They are much more closely aligned now with the IT operations of agencies and commercial enterprises alike, and they are solving, they are looking at the ability to use our solution as a true platform for information governance throughout the enterprise, addressing not only records requirements but a full set of compliance requirements, and certainly addressing cost of managing information.  

IDM: Many TRIM users have noted that when it was released Trim 7 and SharePoint 2010 integration was problematic; have you got that working ideally yet?

DG: The way we chose to integrate with SharePoint was a very different way than most organisations chose to air SharePoint.  We chose to go down a pathway of very deep integration, integrating the solution at the list item level of SharePoint.  And that’s a more daunting engineering challenge, so when the 7.0 version came out the product wasn’t complete and we continue to evolve that.  The 8.0 version of the product [features] significant engineering advancements around integration with SharePoint 2013 with security authentication and with all sorts of things.  So the product has been significantly beefed up. We have a dedicated development team; that team has a road map and we are continuing to enhance the product.  So I think functionality was somewhat limited when it first came out, like most software products I think it experienced the growing pains like most software products do, especially software products that have deep engineering requirements which is what our integration has.  

IDM: So how ready is Records Manager 8 for SharePoint 2013?  

DG:  It completely supports SharePoint 2013.  I think Microsoft made some pretty significant changes from the ’07 version to the 2010, and yet again in 2013, but I think that we’ve learned a lot on how to engineer within the SharePoint environment.  I think the product will go out the door highly stable, it will go out the door very, very capable, and it will offer a full range of support for the 2013 environment.  We’re pretty confident of that simply because we’ve been able to transfer up the code base from the 7.3 series which was clearly the most stable version of that SharePoint integration, and the most powerful in terms of functional delivery.  And we’ve pushed that into 8.0.  And I think that that’s an important message too, that 8.0 is not a start-over or a redo; it’s really built on the 7.3.3 Trim codebase.  And so we’ve actually migrated the product forward, and this has been an important story for our customers in Australia and around the world, because the existing TRIM customer base, the ability to move on to the 8.0 platform, that is going to be like a normal upgrade if they were moving from 7.1 to 7.3, or 7.0 to 7.3 or whatever.  So there’s been a lot of enhancement around how customers can upgrade, and we’re very, very confident that the upgrade experience will be easier, more efficient and the potential will be realised a lot earlier.  

IDM: One of the main reasons given for HP acquiring TRIM in 2008 was to address Microsoft SharePoint compliance and ediscovery opportunities.  Has the additional records management and compliance features in SharePoint 2013 affected this at all, or is that demand still there?  

DG:  I think the door is still wide open.  I mean SharePoint is a really powerful solution.  It is not an enterprise records management solution, it is not an ediscovery management solution.  Our acquisition of Autonomy, the fact that we have a full enterprise scale e-discovery solution that’s now tightly integrated in with the HP Records Management through the IDOL platform provides a very holistic and a very complete enterprise solution for records and e-discovery as well as other use cases.  So I think more, the bigger story has been how we’ve been able to integrate some of the autonomy technology into HP Records Manager, most notably the Control Point Solution which is really at the front end, we built an incredible integration between Control Point and HP Records Manager , and we actually started that in the TRIM series, the ability to identify content, automatically apply file plan classification roles from TRIM or HP Records Manager directly onto identified content, and then migrate that content into a records repository as a solution that is pretty much unique in the marketplace.  And we have tremendous market interest around that idea.  So SharePoint is a big part of our story, but the overall information governance piece from compliance from e-discovery, from legal hold, and from content identification and control, I think really provides us a significant differentiation.  

IDM: How will HP Records Manager fit with other Autonomy document management systems?  Will they be offered separately in different markets?  At the moment the perception is TRIM is very strong in Federal and State government in Australia; Autonomy WorkSite for instance, has a dominant position in legal and financial sector.  Will you be retaining WorkSite as a brand, how will that work going forward?

DG: The good news is that the WorkSite product line and the HP RIM, HP Records Manager products are all managed by the same organisation within HP Autonomy, which is all part of HP software.  So our operations are integrated, our development teams are integrated, our go-to-market is integrated.  

One part of our HP RM announcement was that we’re announcing back-end  integration into WorkSite There are customers who will, because of their requirement to organise information by a project or what you would call in the legal world, a matter, and WorkSite is a fantastic product for that solution.  For organisations who want to organise information according to a file plan and classification HP Records Manager is the best solution.  

It’s the same sales team that is selling both of these products, and our sales people have been trained and are continuing to be trained and enabled on how to understand what the best solution is for the customer. We’ve had some instances where WorkSite will be replacing TRIM on the front end, and we’ve had some instances where HP Records Manager is going to be replacing WorkSite. And it’s really based on the way an organisation wants to classify and organise its information.  

It sounds a little bit confusing because there is really strong document management in both of these products, but when you go in and explore a use case with an organisation and you understand for example, a real estate company, they organise their information around a building or their asset.  And everything that’s part of that asset is subordinate, so you’re able to inherit metadata from the core asset into documents.  

Whereas if you’re in an enterprise organisation you can’t really organise your information according to that way and you want to organise it with a broader file plan or classification scheme that’s more hierarchical than linear.  

So once you get into understanding what the customer wants, you know, we have a pretty core methodology of saying, “Here’s what we think your best solution is.”  And in many cases the customer now says, “Well, we really want to do both.”  We want the ability to do collaboration on WorkSite but we want to be able to use HP Records Manager as our records management solution on the back end, as our core repository.  So we’re offering that solution as well.  I think the benefit is that we are integrated as an organisation and we’re able to, we’ve been able to obviously effectively put together kind of a cohesive go-to-market for both products.  

IDM: According to the Records Manager announcement “this release furthers HP’s push towards the next generation EDRMS as a more web-based application based on the Trim codebase and functionality delivered on premise or via the Cloud."  So what is missing that is needed to achieve this aim 100%?

DG: The desire to do records management in the cloud is kind of emerging now; and we’re seeing quite a bit of it in Australia where agencies can’t afford to manage and run these systems, but they’re integral to their business.  So we are looking at standardising delivery platforms; I think that’s the piece that’s missing.  The capability to offer HP Records Manager in the cloud today exists, in fact we are offering the old TRIM product in the cloud in the US.  We have a couple of partners who have been very skilful at delivering a cloud-based records management solution to the State of Oregon where we have almost 4000 or 5000 users using TRIM deployed that way.  

What we have done is we are lessening the reliance on having the desktop client as the primary communication vehicle.  The new user interface is more than just sprucing up the way people interact with the system which was a big issue, but more importantly it’s containing more and more functionality that really minimises the need for the desktop client and really makes that desktop client an administrative tool.  And as we begin to integrate more and more desktop capability into the web-based client, or that, which is stateless, the ability to offer the solution in the Cloud becomes easier and easier to do because there’s more functionality available to the user.  

We still have a ways to go on that; we have a product plan that includes completing really kind of all of this transferring of the desktop, most of the desktop client into the web-based client by the time of our next release.  But the product is very, very capable of doing cloud-based records management today.

IDM:  It’s widely acknowledged that most information workers don’t want to know anything about records management, and if they asked to do anything or add metadata they won’t do it.  Why do they need to see the TRIM interface at all if they’re not records managers?  Shouldn’t it all be happening behind the scenes?  

DG: The issue is on one hand people want records to be transparent, and on another hand people want employees to be more cognisant of the fact that when they create content it has relevance to an organisation, whether it’s a commercial enterprise or a government enterprise.  I think what we have to do is that the market is not one way or the other, and so we’ve kind of covered the bet on both sides of the equation for those organisations who want to have users interfacing directly with the solution.  

We’ve significantly enhanced the user interface because one of the biggest drawbacks in pushing this solution out wide throughout the enterprise has been the interface was really designed for Records Manager and not an information worker.  So the interface that we put into the product today really is designed for those organisations who want to push the product in the marketplace.  

On the other hand we have the ControlPoint technology that can do auto classification, they can make the user intervention within the system almost completely transparent and automated. We started down this road with SharePoint integration. One of the major design goals of our SharePoint integration was to make the records process automated and transparent to the user.  We set up the ControlPoint integration capability around that idea. The market’s really kind of split, and the reality is that we want to make sure that we have better solutions for both sides of the equation.  

IDM: Lastly, can you let us know some of the technology enhancements for Records Manager 8.0?

DG: Using HTML 5 has enabled us to offer what we call "responsive design" in the product.  Our Web platform now is browser independent, and so it allows the product to work on an Android browser, it allows the product to work on a Microsoft browser, it allows the product to work on a Google browser, and an Apple browser.  We’ve chosen not to go down the app road at this point because we think the product has much broader application and the utility of the product works better.  One of the coolest things that we did at the product kick-off was we actually demo-ed the new user interface from an iPad directly so people got to see what was going on.  And when our engineering team rotated the product from horizontal to vertical, while people got to see firsthand the navigation bar change in the real estate, we’re designing in real time.  So this was an important piece of technology.  On the back end, we continue to support both Oracle and Microsoft databases and we do have this single instancing and tiered storage support for the first time.  These are real enterprise tools which allows the IT organisation to embrace this solution.  In the past it’s really been a solution that was embraced by records people and compliance people.  The product today is really being embraced by IT people, which I think from a records manager standpoint that’s the best thing we could do for them.