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Rimage Pivots to Simplify Enterprise Data Management with ELS and SOPHIA

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VMblog recently met with executives and team members from Rimage, a pioneer and innovator in developing and manufacturing systems for digital data distribution and archiving. During the 53rd IT Press Tour, we met with Rick Bump, Jeff Rosen, and Jeremy Hallin of Rimage to learn about the company's new innovative solutions to simplify data management and maintain good data stewardship. 

Rimage has built a 40+ year history of data management experience and providing specialized hardware solutions, largely optical disc publishing and distribution technology, to vertical industries like law enforcement, medical imaging, and manufacturing. However, as optical disc usage has declined across industries, Rimage has embarked on a strategic pivot into two new areas that aim to simplify enterprise data management: ELS (Electronic Laser Storage) and their new AI software release called SOPHIA.

Four Decades of Mission-Critical Data Management

Founded in 1978, Minnesota-based Rimage has focused largely on helping regulated organizations securely capture, share, and preserve their business-critical data. Early on, Rimage made a name for itself by providing robust CD/DVD publishing and distribution solutions tailored for industries like law enforcement, healthcare, and legal services where data integrity is paramount.

Over 30+ years, Rimage has partnered closely with customers in these verticals to deeply understand their needs around reliable, secure data archiving and access. They have provided specialized hardware and software to help these customers produce large volumes of optical discs on-demand, distribute them efficiently, and integrate the whole workflow securely into existing IT infrastructure.

"We have a long history with customers in spaces like law enforcement, medical imaging, manufacturing, and more where preserving data integrity and security over long periods is absolutely business-critical," said Rick Bump, Rimage's Chief Revenue Officer.

Why Rimage Is Pivoting into New Areas

However, as optical disc usage overall has stagnated and declined in recent years, Rimage realized it needed to expand beyond its legacy hardware business and leverage its expertise to meet evolving customer needs.

We know optical as a data preservation medium has been on the downswing for a while across most industries - it's no longer seen as a growth market. Plus, customer needs are changing. While ensuring data integrity over the long-term remains as crucial as ever, organizations now also need more efficient ways to store exponentially increasing amounts of both structured and unstructured data coming from more sources than ever. They also need to extract more value from their data faster through methods like AI.

Rimage's strategic response has been to leverage its mission-critical data management expertise and strong industry credibility to provide solutions built for the modern data era.

Introducing ELS: A Greener, More Durable Alternative to Tape

One area Rimage is expanding into is Electronic Laser Storage (ELS). As Bump explained, ELS offers "a complementary archival storage technology alternative to tape and flash in terms of longevity, power efficiency, and total cost of ownership."

ELS leverages ultra-dense, multi-layer Blu-ray optical media that can reliably archive vast amounts of infrequently accessed "cold" data for over 50 years at very low power consumption. Bump said ELS consumes less than 10% of the power consumed by traditional storage devices, and enjoys 20 times faster data retrieval speeds since it doesn't require mechanically moving parts to access data like tape.

ELS provides extremely durable, compliant, and eco-friendly long-term data archiving compared to other options: 
  • Far outlasts tape media which degrades substantially after 10 years
  • Uses just 1% of the cooling energy tape libraries require
  • Produces a fraction of tape's carbon footprint
  • Offers immutable storage since optical cannot be remotely altered
  • Encrypted format secures data against cyberattacks
Bump did note however that ELS capacities still need to scale up quickly to handle larger modern dataset sizes beyond hundreds of gigabytes per disk. But Rimage has visibility into significant materials science advancements their optical disc partners like Sony are making that promise to soon unlock far higher multi-terabyte per disk capacities.

Empowering Enterprise Search, Analytics and Collaboration with AI

In addition to ELS providing organizations a greener, future-proof medium for compliant archival and regulatory data preservation, Rimage is also entering the software space to help companies more effectively manage and extract value from data in "hotter" more frequent-access tiers.

The company also announced the launch of SOPHIA, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered software platform purpose-built to handle the full data lifecycle - from inception to destruction. SOPHIA aims to simplify and optimize how enterprises ingest, manage, protect, access, and analyze unstructured data.

"SOPHIA intelligently categorizes large volumes of unstructured data, automatically tagging it with metadata so companies can actually find what they need and get far more utility from the data," Bump said.

The machine learning algorithms underpinning SOPHIA's automated classification and contextual search capabilities are customizable but also leverage accessible AI APIs like Google's image recognition services when available. This means organizations can apply AI to unlock impactful data insights without needing massive internal machine learning expertise.

Designed as an end-to-end modular data management toolkit, SOPHIA will integrate seamlessly with existing storage infrastructure and business software like SharePoint and ServiceNow via open APIs. SOPHIA also facilitates easier collaboration and sharing across employee groups, partners, and customers through its multi-tenant access controls and permissions management.

With SOPHIA, Rimage promises to deliver major time savings, efficiency gains, and new opportunities around enterprise search, data analytics and collaboration - solving many headaches companies experience today trying to wrangle ballooning volumes of unstructured data.

Staying True to Rimage's Core Vertical Expertise

Despite Rimage's push into new frontiers like ELS and SOPHIA to meet evolving business challenges around enterprise data management, Bump emphasized that they remain committed to their bread-and-butter verticals which have driven their success for more than 30 years.

Their strategic shift is primarily about complementing their specialized expertise in mission-critical data archiving for customers in law, medicine, manufacturing and more - not abandoning these core competencies.

"We are responding to clear market signals and customer pain points, but we certainly aren't walking away from customers that still rely heavily on our legacy offerings," Bump said. "For instance, lots of law enforcement agencies still require our reliable optical disc publishing systems, so we will continue advancing our capabilities there."

Moreover, Rimage plans to initially target promoting ELS and SOPHIA mainly to its embedded customer base where trusted relationships already exist. Bump explained that this beachhead strategy with existing customers offers the most achievable initial path to market success and rapid proof-of-value for their new solutions.

Over time however, if ELS and SOPHIA gain traction with customers in law, healthcare and other verticals Rimage knows extremely well, they aim to broaden their appeal to more enterprise data management use cases across industries.

ELS: Leveraging Optical Media's Immutability for Compliant Archiving

So for now, Rimage is playing to its strengths by honing ELS and SOPHIA to solve pressing data challenges organizations face in verticals like legal services, public sector, and healthcare IT where data integrity, security and compliance reign supreme. During the ITPT event, we were told that ELS has already received strong validation from a Chief Risk Officer at Beryllium, emphasizing the compliant data protection advantages.

Professions like pharmaceutical research, financial trading, law offices and more legally need to preserve data unmodified for decades in some instances to meet various safeguards and oversight requirements. So ELS offers advantages around how its "physical immutability" cannot be remotely altered like magnetic tape or hacked like networked appliances, according to Bump. This compliant tamperproof data preservation makes ELS an interesting fit for cost-effectively addressing cooler long-term archival demands in specialized verticals. In fact, countries like China see similar regulatory compliance and cyberattack protection benefits, recently issuing government policies for agencies to fully migrate archival systems over to optical libraries within 10 years.

SOPHIA: Helping Under-Resourced Industries Search and Analyze Data

In addition to ELS serving ongoing niche compliant data archiving use cases as digital transformation evolves, Rimage's AI-centric SOPHIA platform aims to make enterprise search, content analysis and metadata analytics capabilities more attainable for industries like public sector and healthcare that typically lack ample IT resources.

Searching records across disconnected archives using manual processes today is extremely inefficient. And few sectors beyond tech giants have abundant data science talent and tools needed to maximize business intelligence extraction from swelling information volumes.

SOPHIA promises to help such under-resourced industries finally harness AI's efficiency benefits to automatically index vast dark information stores. This enables more convenient enterprise search and accelerated information analysis, while still keeping sensitive data on-premises rather than relying purely on external cloud tools beyond their control.

"We don't want customers to have to rewrite what they are currently doing - SOPHIA integrates into existing workflows and storage systems," Bump emphasized.

Rimage Poised to Disrupt Data Management Software Markets Too

Between ELS presenting compliance, security and sustainability advantages over tape in supported use cases, and SOPHIA making AI search and analytics more turnkey for data-rich but IT resource-constrained public sector agencies, Rimage looks well-positioned to disrupt sleepy storage hardware markets as well as faster-moving software spaces like data integration tools.

Neither ELS nor SOPHIA seem like niche ‘vitamin' plays only useful for small workloads. Rather, they offer ‘painkiller' remedies to pressing problems that enterprise IT practitioners contend with daily related to ballooning unstructured data, especially in the verticals Rimage knows best.

By innovating compelling new solutions while doubling down on its mission-critical data management vertical expertise rather than abandoning its roots, Rimage may very well succeed in evolving beyond its hardware heritage. Their strategic mix of data integrity DNA and forward-thinking offerings could make enterprise content understanding, preservation and analysis simpler for customers needing to balance accessibility, security and usability as data volumes explode.

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Published Friday, February 16, 2024 7:30 AM by David Marshall
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