Dexrex Gear ChatSync Archives Chat, Text Messages

Company:

Headquarters: Newton, Mass.

Technology Sector: Mobile

Key Product: Dexrex Gear ChatSync

Year Founded: 2005

Number of Channel Partners: 3 in the U.S., more partnerships to come

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Dexrex Gear's data management tool offers storage of text-based communications traffic, including IM, SMS and social media.

The Lowdown: Dexrex Gear is aiming to take advantage of two quickly growing markets: unified communications and compliance infrastructure. "Our initial focus is on the regulated markets. Instant messages (IMs) need to be treated more like e-mail. Companies should have policies of use and effective archival abilities to retrieve specific communications," said Dexrex CEO Derek Lyman. "We see this as something that should be standard and that will become a default: Customers should have a comprehensive data management suite. All [means of communication] should be captured, archived and processed into whatever platform the customer is using."

ChatSync is the vendor's enterprise-focused data storage management offering for IM and mobile SMS text messages. It captures text-based messages from consumer and business IM, SMS and social media platforms and offloads them to a secure and centralized storage platform within the cloud. The solution normalizes the data and archives it in a structured database to ensure fast and efficient search and retrieval for compliance, e-discovery and adherence to storage best practices. According to Lyman, the product can be used at a one-person shop or at a multimillion-dollar enterprise. "It's all about scale. It's about getting the costs of compliance and data synchronization down," Lyman said. "We could sell this into a one-man shop just as easily as we could service a channel servicing millions of in-boxes."

Lyman and CTO Richard Tortora founded the company while the two were students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The two are committed to forging new channel partnerships in the coming months and do not sell the product directly.

"We're all about integrated solutions -- it's not about having our own stack of data," Lyman added. "We're very channel-oriented."