Last week I attended Iron Mountain’s Analyst Day and had a chance to catch up with Iron Mountain and its Iron Mountain Digital business unit. Bob Brennan, CEO and president of Iron Mountain, and Ramana Venkat, president of Iron Mountain Digital, recapped Iron Mountain’s business and forecast for the upcoming year and talked about the company’s transformation.
Last week I attended Iron Mountain’s Analyst Day and had a chance to catch up with Iron Mountain and its Iron Mountain Digital business unit. Bob Brennan, CEO and president of Iron Mountain, and Ramana Venkat, president of Iron Mountain Digital, recapped Iron Mountain’s business and forecast for the upcoming year and talked about the company’s transformation.
Iron Mountain acquires Mimosa Systems
The “traditional” company – the Iron Mountain with a fleet of white trucks that picks up paper-based records and tapes — collects and transports as many as 600 million boxes a year, each consisting of about 1,200 files – which are retained for an average of 17 years. The company processes 60 million tapes a month.
The company, which reports $3 billion in revenues and $500 million in cash, is capital intensive since it requires real estate to store all the paper-based records and tapes. Iron Mountain claims some 140,000 customers in a variety of industries. And, its Iron Mountain Digital Business unit is growing as evidenced by its focus on acquisitions.
In the past few years, Iron Mountain has been on a tear acquiring companies that let it build its “digital” business. In 2004, Iron Mountain acquired Connected, a provider of online backup services and in 2005 acquired LiveVault, a provider of online backup for servers and PCs. In 2007, Iron Mountain continued its advance into eDiscovery with its buy of Stratify. And, most recently in February of this year it acquired Mimosa Systems, known for its NearPoint content archiving software.
Iron Mountain is involved in “day forward” digitization, Brennan says. “Backfile conversion is stupid.”
Further he says that Iron Mountain can be a customer’s trusted adviser and set off to prove it in a variety of presentations from customers.
Venkata took up that mantra of trust and expanded upon it. In a conversation on Digital 2.0, Venkata explained that Iron Mountain estimates that it cost 20 to 500 times as much to touch a document once than to store it untouched for 20 years. Referencing the cloud, Venkata says it must be able to store and manage information in a location-agnostic manner. A hybrid approach to the cloud – from on-premises to hybrid to hosted – is necessary.
