This week, Gartner published their long awaited, first ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA) Solutions. We’ve written about what DCGA is, but essentially it represents the evolution from the legacy Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) market, that was built on email and file based archiving, to the the current need to apply capture, archiving, data retention, surveillance, supervision, behavioral analytics, auditing and e-discovery towards Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) platforms. For Theta Lake, it was great news - as we were named a Visionary.

Responding to governance events, like audits, investigations and e-discovery, in the era of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) is hard. IT stakeholders, such as those responsible for compliance archive storage and architecture, responding to search requests from compliance and legal, are overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of today’s modern communications and by the constraints of heritage archiving investments. Unfortunately for those involved, both on the IT and compliance/legal side, search and discovery might consist of a “best guess” effort making it challenging to identify risk or wrongdoing, form a judgment on the merits of a case and at its worse, suffer fines, sanctions, negative verdicts and damage to the organization’s brand and reputation.

XLoD Global 2024, held in NYC on June 11 brought together regulatory intelligence leaders, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts from around the globe focused on organization experiences, best practices and technology approaches to the three lines of defense for risk and audit scenarios. While there were a broad array of topics covered- from AI and blockchain to cybersecurity and IoT, the issue of voice compliance- and how to best approach it was a topic that surfaced itself in numerous panel sessions, roundtables and customer interactions. As seen in one session, 67% of the audience is seeing an increase in voice compliance regulatory inquiries and exams.

The news

A number of events in the past few years have validated the Theta Lake thesis that successful unified communications and collaboration (UCC) requires seamlessly integrated compliance and security. One of the first signifiers was the 50M series B round investment in Theta Lake, which included participation by some of the leading UCC providers including Zoom Video Communications Inc, RingCentral Ventures, Cisco Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. The market need has also been proven (an understatement) by the 2.6B in regulatory fines that have been levied on the financial services industry due to poor recordkeeping and unmonitored communications. The latest far reaching market event and a benefit to organizations everywhere, waslast month’s announcement from Zoom of the availability of Zoom Compliance Manager, powered by Theta Lake.

The toggle tax is a concept introduced by Harvard Business Reviewto describe the amount of time users spend (and waste) toggling between their different workplace applications. While it may seem like just a measure of the time users spend, the study reveals that there is an enormous cognitive toll that takes place as users engage in what is known as context switching, and recalibrating themselves. As a result, it leads to losses in productivity.

Gartner introduced a new market category earlier this year, Digital Communications Governance (see our earlier blog here). Recently in November, they published the first Market Guide, outlining what constitutes a DCG vendor and offering some guidance. 

Since 2018, Theta Lake has partnered with Zoom to provide cutting-edge compliance and security for Zoom's unified communications (UC) platform. Our expertise in delivering advanced, purpose-built compliance and security technology perfectly complements Zoom, particularly in addressing the specific requirements of risk-sensitive and regulated organizations when using Zoom. As one of the select group of strategic partners chosen to participate in Zoom’s ISV Exchange Program, it is now easier than ever for organizations to benefit from Theta Lake’s purpose-built compliance platform to ensure that all communication content is securely captured, preserved, and supervised.

The Salesforce ecosystem encapsulates a wide spectrum of communication types, including instant messaging, enterprise social and email messages to support customer relationship initiatives worldwide, across centralized, hybrid and remote work environments. Firms use Salesforce technologies to foster communication, support customer engagement and ensure customer retention. 

In today's dynamic business environment, with teams often distributed across multiple geographies, effective work management is crucial for organizations to stay organized, collaborate efficiently, and meet project deadlines. To streamline work processes and enhance productivity, many companies rely on popular work management tools like Asana and Monday.com. However, ensuring compliance and mitigating risks associated with these platforms can be challenging. 

A new market category for communications compliance

On July 14, Gartner introduced a new market segment called Digital Communications Governance in two of their Hype Cycles, in both Storage and Data Protection and Data Security. Gartner clients use Hype Cycles to evaluate the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. Gartner listed Theta Lake as a sample vendor in this category.