Dexrex Adds Management, Archiving To Social Networking

Dexrex Gear is helping solution providers and customers respond to the burgeoning stream of data from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with new cloud-based data management solutions.

Dexrex on Monday launched version 2.2 of its ChatSync message archiving and management platform, expanding its capabilities from instant messaging to supporting popular social networking platforms, said Derek Lyman, co-founder and CEO of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.

ChatSync is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform developed to provide an enterprise data management solution for storing real-time text-based communications for compliance and discovery, Lyman said.

’We provide common data management on everything outside of e-mail,’ he said. ’E-mail management as been addressed.’

Compliance and e-discovery is becoming the biggest driver for increased interest in the storage and management of data generated by social networking uses, Lyman said.

That push is coming from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), an independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the U.S.

FINRA in January updated its guidance to reflect the need for broker-dealers to retain records of communications through social networking sites.

Next: Dexrex Focuses On Regulated Industries

Dexrex’s focus is on regulated industries, where social networking from various platforms has become a business reality, Lyman said.

ChatSync offers extensible APIs to plug into users’ devices, messaging clients, or messaging servers, and works in parallel with the messaging application to capture the media streams, Lyman said.

Those messaging streams are captured into a centralized storage system and then normalized, which is a process for turning data into a format that can be readily used to build other services.

’All the data from those systems gets captured and normalized, and then moved into our system before sending it to customers’ other applications,’ he said. ’Those services include things like a compliance officer using a word processor portal to search and tag data, or for bulk archiving to WORM (write once, read many) media.’

ChatSync 2.2 works across multiple social networking sites for a price of between $1 and $2 per seat, per month, Lyman said. That compares to $10 to $20 per seat, per month for other solutions which only work with one type of messaging platform, he said.

Dexrex is a 100 percent channel-focused vendor working with partners tied to the ’inboxes,’ including e-mail services, unified communications, and managed service providers.

’We integrate into their solutions, and provide an add-on revenue stream, but add only 5 (percent) to 10 percent to their total cost,’ Lyman said.