Clearwell Systems last week introduced its first product, an appliance designed to save customers time and money managing and analyzing e-mail for regulatory compliance and other purposes.

The company, backed by $4 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, says its Email Intelligence Platform sits on an Ethernet network and discovers, organizes and analyzes e-mail, attachments and instant messages. Company executives relate the product to business-intelligence offerings that extract information from relational databases.

The Clearwell appliance analyzes messages and attachments in Microsoft Exchange databases and other e-mail stores, crawls messaging directories, and applies algorithms to sort messages and data. It creates a map of employees in an organization who are using mail and indexes the message stores. The appliance can process thousands of messages at a time, not batches of 10 to 20, as do legal-discovery packages, such as MetaLINCs or Stratify.

Constellation Energy, a Clearwell customer, says it had 225 requests to recover and analyze e-mail last year.

"Finding the proverbial e-mail in the haystack and being able to identify all the players, all their attached documents and all their conversations was becoming significantly more onerous and costly," says John Petruzzi, director of enterprise security for the Baltimore energy company.

Constellation uses HP's Reference Information Storage System to archive e-mail, but can't use it to easily search and analyze messages, he says. A dashboard program with Clearwell's product enables Constellation to identify business risks based on messaging analysis, Petruzzi adds.

Among Clearwell's competitors are companies such as EMC and Symantec whose products discover e-mail but require human review to analyze it. Clearwell says its appliance is more sophisticated and scalable than its competitors' in analyzing and correlating e-mail trails, number of discussions and topics.

Software that allows only keyword searches of e-mail does not have sufficient complexity to perform searches and retrieval of messages needed for regulatory compliance or evidentiary discovery, the company says.

The starting price for the Clearwell Email Intelligence Platform is $50,000 for 100GB e-mail analyzed.