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Transatlantic Reinsurance Company: Page 2 of 4

Pichardo decided to find a dedicated search product and worry about archiving later. He had dealt with some of startup Clearwell Systems' executives when they worked for other firms and gave the startup a call. (See Clearwell Analyzes Email.) Although Clearwell was just bringing out its Email Intelligence Platform, Pichardo found its search features much more sophisticated than desktop search products from Google and Yahoo.

Clearwell software sorts messages on Exchange servers by factors such as the names of the senders and recipients, attachments, the number of replies generated, the time between replies, and how many times messages were forwarded.

"Everybody can do keyword search," Pichardo says. "We needed intelligent search. You might get two million hits on a query -- how do you rank that? We need to make intelligent sense of it."

Although Clearwell's software works with archiving products and Hewlett-Packard sells it integrated with its Reference Information Storage System (RISS), TRC purchased a Clearwell appliance that plugs into the network, which also contains Network Appliance storage systems.

Pichardo says Clearwell's price -- it starts at $50,000 for 100 Gbytes of email analyzed -- falls between the cost of enterprise desktop search software and full archiving systems. However, it does not manage emails and set retention policies as archiving software does.