AXS-One is educating legal on IT, but CIOs and IT must fend for themselves

Synopsis Part 1: AXS-One agrees Spitzer and financials drove email archiving, what's next for blogs and wikis?
Synopsis Part 2: AXS-One is educating legal on IT, but CIOs and IT must fend for themselves
Synopsis Part 3: Electronic Discovery behind the firewall and AXS-One vision, will it be 20/20?

Electronic data discovery interview -  William "Bill" Lyons, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AXS-One®, (Part 2 of 3)

Bill Lyons joins AXS-One after serving as chief executive in several high growth software companies for large enterprise markets. In his last assignment, he served as President and CEO of Caminus Corporation, a publicly traded software company, providing mid and back office software applications to the global energy industry before it was sold to SunGard Data Systems. Previously, Mr. Lyons served as Chief Executive Officer of numerous software companies in both the public and private marketplace including Ashton-Tate, ParcPlace Systems, Finjan Software and NeuVis. Prior to his software executive positions, Lyons spent 18 years at the IBM Company in various sales and marketing roles culminating as Vice President Software/ General Manager PC Merchandising.

By Joshua Konkle writing for DCIGInc.com
www.dciginc.com

Joshua Konkle: How do you educate the IT people on important legal concepts?

Bill Lyons: AXS-One is a software company and we don't try to pretend to be lawyers!  We have sufficient experience in-house to be able to educate on key concepts and direct GC to appropriate organizations (such as consultants with whom we have ongoing relationships) where they can get more information, as necessary.  Most importantly, we encourage prospects to talk with existing customers on the issues. During 2007, this has been a regular topic for discussion during our customer advisory board meetings, for instance.

Joshua Konkle: How do you educate legal counsel on Technology?

Bill Lyons: In the same way that we have been advising Compliance Officers on IT issues for more than 15 years, we have developed extensive domain expertise to advise GC on IT issues. 
We encourage prospects to talk with our existing customers on the issues.  Moreover,  my marketing teams just completed two major events with General Counsel , one in the US and one in Australia.  Both events were well attended, but the US event covered a broad range of legal topics.  I was happy to learn from that AXS-One was the 2nd most requested vendor at those events. Both Australian and US attendees made it clear that legal counsel is focused and looking for solutions now.

Practically speaking, we have a couple of customers who have appointed specific appointments to manage communications between IT and legal groups.

Joshua Konkle: One of the most frequently asked questions by CIO's and others worried about the cost of data management is "how long do I have to keep my data, really?"  What do you say when you get asked that question?

Bill Lyons: We can help is the first thing I say.  We have been providing record compliance solutions for many years.  In all cases, we discuss the need to plan for secure destruction and work with customers on implementing appropriate technology to manage the retention, disposition, preservation and destruction of data.

The appropriate technology comes in the form of defining business documents by way of business process evaluation.  Axs-One system incorporates business process management (BPM) application and uses that to support data definitions for retention and disposition.  In addition, we have a legal hold capability that is integrated into legal search.  For example, a customer searches for data during a certain time frame.  That search can be put on hold, regardless of the data retention requires.  The system also supports tracking physical records, such as a paper and boxed records.

If you would like to communicate with him directly, he can be reached at info(at)axs-one.com or by calling AXS-One at 1 201 935-3400.

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