Orchestria finally announced their first “true” general DLP product.

For those of you who don’t know, Orchestria has danced around this space for a few years now. They started with a product narrowly focused on helping certain financial services firms, particularly broker/dealers, manage compliance issues around insider trading and privacy. Basically you can think about it as a client-centric (with some networking monitoring) DLP solution focused on one category of violations. It didn’t work well as a general DLP solution, but that wasn’t their market.

Interestingly enough it was based on Autonomy’s Aungate technology, but then Autonomy started pushing Aungate competitively and Orchestria had to do a little re-working (industry rumor stuff, this didn’t come through confidential channels). Autonomy has since bought Zantaz and are combining the products.

Anyway, back to Orchestria. Since I worked with them before and don’t know exactly how much is public about the new product I can’t go into any details. What I’m comfortable saying is that it looks interesting, covers the bases to be considered more Content Monitoring and Filtering than just DLP, and I’ll withhold judgement until we see some deployments and competitive evaluations.

But they might not get the chance if their sales guys are as poorly educated on the competition as the press release and their product site indicates. They claim to be the first “next generation” DLP solution; filling the gaps uncovered by others.

Let’s look at a few:

Unlike first-generation DLP software, Orchestria provides coverage across all points of risk within an enterprise, detects violations accurately with minimal false positives, and can proactively block true infractions.

Weird. That’s what customers tell me all the major DLP solutions do. Especially the top five of VontuReconnexWebsenseVericept, and EMC/Tablus. My assessment is that every one of these products provides that, and some others, like <a href=”http://www.codegree

etworks.com”>Code Green (a mid-sized play) also provide it.

Orchestria Multi-Layered Defense – Orchestria Multi-Layered Defense leverages multiple network, server, client, import and archive agents to ensure control across all forms of electronic data, including messages with encrypted and password-protected files, internal messages, disconnected laptops, files at rest, and mobile storage devices – most of which are ignored by first-generation solutions.

Totally untrue. All the top five do all, or most, of that. Sometimes it takes third-party integration, so maybe that’s the grey area they’re taking advantage of.

Orchestria Full-Dimensional Analysis – Limited to content-focused inspection, first-generation platforms falsely flag numerous legitimate messages. These “false positives” create a significant review burden and prevent organizations from implementing controls that block or correct messages before they are sent or files before they are saved. Orchestria’s Full-Dimensional Analysis not only analyzes content, but also dynamically examines content-around-content, message context, the identity of sender and recipients, hierarchy, and user input. This approach can reduce false positives by more than 90% compared to first-generation solutions.

I’m unaware of any major DLP product that doesn’t use context as well as content. Actually, they sort of have to in order to work.

Orchestria Incident-Appropriate Action – Far beyond passive post-incident review employed by first-generation technologies, Orchestria proactively protects enterprises by matching responses specifically to the type and severity of the violation. In addition to providing the industry’s leading workflow-enabled review capability, Orchestria supports a variety of “before-the-send” actions including blocking, correcting, and quarantining. This solution also automatically classifies, routes, and stores sensitive messages and files to meet a variety of records management and legal mandates.

Common features in any successful DLP product. I’ll give them a little credit, most of the other DLP tools don’t focus on compliance archiving and require more manual tuning and technology integration to manage that. But workflow review? Hell, I’ve been working with all the major DLP vendors for years on this (at least the ones that didn’t come up with good systems on their own).

Dr. Sara Radicati of The Radicati Group said, “The key advantage with Orchestria DLP is responding to potential violations with automated incident-appropriate actions – from a routine warning, to forwarding to a supervisor, to nothing at all. As it all happens in real time, customers will know that their messages haven’t been banished to a backed-up review queue for hours or even days

This is why I’m very careful about the custom quotes I’ll do (none for years now, but never say never); they make you sound like a … well, I’d use the word we’re all thinking if it were a guy, but I’ll never say that about a woman who doesn’t print it on her business card. I hope I get to stay on my high horse indefinitely; now that I’m an independent consultant we’ll see how long I last.

“Orchestria’s DLP solution provides a new and different approach that fulfills all requirements for effective protection,” said Bo Ma ing, Orchestria’s president and chief executive officer. “It covers all points of risk within the enterprise, accurately distinguishes violations from false positives, and enables the right action, including proactive protection – all on the industry’s most flexible architecture.

Bo, I think you’ve done some cool stuff, but you’re better off focusing on what you really bring that’s new to the market (and you do have a couple things) than exaggerated marketing that won’t stand up once someone glances at a competitor. Your website is even more full of omissions and errors than this release.

DLP is probably the ugliest market I covered as an analyst. It’s seriously rough and tumble with over a dozen vendors fighting over what was only $50M last year, and will probably only be $100-120M this year. Unless by “First Gen” you mean products from 2 years ago, you’re in for a surprise once you go into competitive evaluations.

Marketing aside I think Orchestria will be one to watch and a few competitive wins could open up some big opportunities. Right now, the jury is out and it’s clear whoever wrote their marketing materials needs to take a close look at the competition.

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