The Gilbane Enterprise DRM Conference, held in San Francisco this week, was the venue for a number of interesting product announcements from Enterprise DRM vendors, including Essential Security Software (ESS), Liquid Machines, and the UK-based Avoco Secure.
ESS, maker of the Taceo peer-to-peer DRM solution for small businesses, announced a partnership with Microsoft that will result in interoperability with Microsoft's Windows Rights Management Services (RMS). Companies that use RMS can email protected documents outside their firewalls to recipients in other organizations, and the recipients can be authenticated to decrypt and use those documents, but only if the other organizations use Microsoft Active Directory for user identity management.
ESS's new technology, which is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year, will interoperate with RMS by translating bidirectionally between several parallel aspects of RMS and Taceo. It will translate identities between Active Directory and ESS's proprietary identity management scheme (which is PC-based and does not require servers), and it will translate rights descriptions and keys between the two systems.
This is a rare example of synergy among putative competitors in a crowded market. Taceo is intended for smaller organizations that don't have identity servers of any kind, while RMS is meant for larger ones, specifically "Microsoft shops" that use Active Directory for identity management. Direct competition between the two products is possible but relatively unlikely; the price points are quite different. Therefore, interoperability between the two products makes sense, particularly because inter-enterprise document sharing is one of the complexities that slows down Enterprise DRM adoption.
Liquid Machines, meanwhile, made two new product announcements. The most interesting of these is about Google Mini Gateway, which makes encrypted documents available for indexing with the Google Mini enterprise search appliance.
This technology is not quite "first of its kind," as the Liquid Machines press release states, though it is potentially very useful. It is a solution to what we have called, in a different context, the "discoverability paradox" of DRM-protected content: if content is packaged with DRM to control access to it, then it can't be indexed by search engines -- with the result that users can't "discover" the content. In effect, Liquid Machines Google Mini Gateway does for enterprise documents and the Google Mini search appliance as Eluminator did for commercial content and public Internet search engines several years ago.
Producers of commercial content suffer from the discoverability paradox to this day; the controversy over Google Book Search has heightened awareness of the problem. In 1999, a company called MediaDNA discovered a solution: to encrypt documents but make words contained in them available for indexing by Internet search engines (by creating metatags on web pages surrounding the encrypted files). MediaDNA called this technology Eluminator and ended up selling it to Inceptor, a search engine marketing technology company, in late 2001.
Liquid Machines Google Mini Gateway works slightly differently: when the search engine comes across a protected document, it calls the Liquid Machines DRM engine to decrypt it for the sole purpose of extracting keywords for indexing. Users must still have proper credentials in order to decrypt and view (or edit) the file. But the effect is the same: coexistence of content discoverability with access control -- a desirable outcome. This technology is complementary to the existing integrations of Enterprise DRM technologies (including Liquid Machines') with document management systems, which enable the document management systems to index encrypted documents for search within the repositories.
Avoco Secure is a UK-based startup that received its first round of venture funding about a year ago. It exhibited at the Gilbane Enterprise DRM Conference as part of its entry into the US market. The company's solution, secure2trust, uses an combination of OS and application level DRM technology that enables it to package a wide variety of file formats on PCs. Like Taceo, secure2trust bundles user authentication information with packaged files, instead of issuing licenses from a file server a la Authentica and others. This enables secure2trust to work in serverless environments, but the technology also interoperates with various common identity management schemes, including Active Directory and X.509 certificates. It also has been integrated with EMC Documentum and other high-end content management systems.
At the conference, Avoco Secure announced a beta version of its integration with Microsoft's upcoming Office 2007 suite and enhanced integration with Microsoft SharePoint content management services. This is a result of the company's involvement in Microsoft SecureIT Alliance. Published case studies or press releases about Enterprise DRM deployments are rare, because Enterprise DRM customers are generally averse to publicizing information about technology they use, but Avoco Secure released a case study of secure2trust deployment at the Arab National Bank of Saudi Arabia.
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