PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Smarsh®, the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, today introduced version 2.0 of smarshEncrypt, its hosted secure messaging platform. The latest upgrades to the email encryption system enable users to not only deliver messages and files securely, but also to communicate back-and-forth confidentially within smarshEncrypt’s secure cloud.

Using Smarsh’s proprietary data-leak prevention engine, smarshDLP, administrators can establish corporate usage policies and automatically enforce the encrypted transmission of email and files that meet specified criteria. For example, email to specific recipients, or messages featuring specific content in the body or in attachments, can trigger delivery via smarshEncrypt. Encrypted delivery can also be initiated manually by the sender.

From there, message recipients are notified of the secure transmission and follow simple instructions to access the smarshEncrypt secure cloud. In seconds, the sender and recipient(s) can confidentially and securely read and reply to messages sent via the platform. Intellectual property, sensitive client financial information or private health information, for instance, can be transmitted back-and-forth in accordance with emerging state and federal data protection and data breach mandates and regulations.

According to Osterman Research, secure/encrypted email will be a top-five priority for organizational I.T. spending through late 2010¹. Its recent white paper “The Critical Need for Encrypted Email and File Transfer Solutions” contends that encrypted email and file transfer solutions are becoming a business and legal necessity due to the high volume of sensitive content stored within and delivered via email. With increasing governance and regulatory obligations – including state laws in Massachusetts and Nevada, the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation S-P) and The Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – the punitive consequences associated with failure to protect sensitive data outweigh the cost of deploying encryption capabilities.

All aspects of an organization’s smarshEncrypt experience – including notifications – can be customized, strengthening branding efforts and building trust with a demonstrated commitment to client data security.

Deployed via the “SaaS” (software-as-a-service) model, the smarshEncrypt platform lightens the burden on email servers, as both secure messages and attached files reside in the smarshEncrypt secure cloud (rather than on the sender’s or recipient’s email server). Clients can use smarshEncrypt as a dedicated, secure file transfer system and eliminate the impact of file-size limits within their email systems. Email-related storage and costs are reduced, as is impact on network bandwidth.

The smarshEncrypt service is designed to integrate seamlessly with Smarsh’s hosted email archiving and compliance solutions. Within Smarsh's archiving infrastructure, the entire life cycle of an email can be tracked, starting with the original “pre-encrypted” message and including the comprehensive audit trail attached to each message.

The Web-based Smarsh Management Console serves as the consolidated administration destination for multiple functions. There is no need to log into separate applications to access encryption controls, another to view “quarantined” pre-review messages and then another for the email supervision system.

No hardware, software or plug-ins are needed to access the Web-based system, and there are no certificate or key exchanges necessary to access secure messages. The smarshEncrypt platform works with any email client, email system (including CRMs) or operating system, and service is compatible with all mobile messaging devices, including the BlackBerry and the iPhone.

“The development goals we set forth for smarshEncrypt were simple: leverage our years as a managed service leader in email compliance to give clients peace of mind with their email encryption efforts, and to create a solution that is easy to use and easy to administrate,” said Smarsh CEO Steve Marsh. “At the same time, email usage in the workplace has proliferated over time, the regulatory and legal environments have evolved and a whole set of subsequent risk and corporate knowledge management obligations have emerged.

“We recognized that organizations are approaching these emerging challenges with different solutions that often complicate or impede each other,” added Marsh. “With the Smarsh suite of integrated archiving and compliance solutions, we offer businesses an uncomplicated, efficient and reliable means to seamlessly support several mission-critical priorities – email archiving, classification, supervision, data-leak prevention and encryption – with a common set of tools.”

¹ Osterman Research. “The Critical Need for Encrypted Email and File Transfer Solutions.” July 2009.

About Smarsh (www.smarsh.com)

Smarsh® is the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email-archiving solutions for message compliance and records retention, proactive litigation readiness and mail server data management. Smarsh solutions for data-leak prevention and secure messaging help users meet email and file transfer encryption obligations, mitigate risk associated with outbound email, and facilitate email supervision.

The SaaS (software as a service) delivery model enables clients to eliminate IT infrastructure costs and minimize operating burden, while benefiting from Smarsh’s expertise and experience in hosting large volumes of mission-critical client data. Customizable solutions fit the needs, budgets and technological infrastructure of any organization – big or small – and are matched with unrivaled customer support and service.

Founded in 2001, Smarsh’s growth has been recognized at both the local and national level. In 2008 and 2009, the company was named to the “Inc. 500,” Inc. magazine’s annual analysis of the fastest-growing companies in the United States. The Portland Business Journal recently ranked Smarsh No. 1 in its 2009 growth rankings for the state of Oregon.

Smarsh Inc.
Ken Anderson, 503-946-6044
kanderson@smarsh.com

Howard Lerman can be a little intense. After the CEO of Yext finished his demo at this year’s Techcrunch50 (embedded below) he left one judge “speechless,” and during rehearsals Michael took him aside and asked him, “Are you on drugs?” He wasn’t. Lerman just has the heightened dopamine levels of an entrepreneur. And he hadn’t slept for 45 days because he was pushing his New York City startup to relaunch on an entirely new technology platform for TechCrunch50

Over the past three years, Lerman and his co-founders (who all went to the same high school together in Virginia), have built a local advertising business under everyone’s nose that is on track to generate $20 million in revenues this year.Yext is going after the huge, entrenched Yellow Pages business with online ads for local businesses that result in phone calls instead of clicks.

At TechCrunch50, which was the company’s public debut, Yext relaunched with a whole new product, going from plain vanilla pay-per-call ads to pay-per-action ads where the action is a relevant call that actually drives new business. Each ad has a unique trackable number that goes through Yext’s system, where it is recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Yext customers get their own inbox for calls which is like a Google Voice for businesses. There is a transcript for each call, the phone number of the person who called, and a full audio file that can be played back. When a business signs up, Yext places ads for them across the Web in local directories such as Yellowpages.com, SuperPages.com, Local.com, 1-800-Free-411, 4Info, Topix, RepairPal, and more. It turns those ads into phone calls.

Yext uses speech-to-text recognition licensed from IBM and fine-tuned with its own algorithms for each business category it targets. Co-founder Brent Metz used to be an engineer in IBM’s speech science labs, and his name appears on many IBM patents. Only when certain key words related to the actual services offered by the business are mentioned in a call (”spinal decompression,” “oil change,” “install countertops”) does Yext charge for it. Wrong numbers, marketing calls, or calls from beyond a pre-determined geographic area are put in a junk folder and Yext doesn’t charge for those.

This means Yext needs to be really good at both driving relevant calls to local businesses and identifying them. “You’ve got to be transparent,” says Lerman. “We take all the risk, then we pull our pants down and show them what they get.” Lerman is so confident of his technology that at TechCrunch50, he switched all 20,000 local businesses already using Yext over to the pay-per-action system. It is a big, gutsy bet.

The minute he stepped off the stage, Lerman was inundated with emails and business cards from seemingly every venture capitalist and M&A officer in the room. He tried to ignore them and soak in the rest of the conference, but some of them were from people any startup CEO would be foolish to ignore. He took a few meetings with the most serious VCs, and ended up closing a $25 million B round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (which is also an investor in Twitter). The money just hit Yext’s bank account a few hours ago. “Anyone who doesn’t launch at TechCrunch50 is crazy,” says Lerman.

IVP partner Dennis Phelps will be joining Yext’s board. Sutter Hill Ventures, which had put in $3.5 million in an A round in June, 2008, also participated in this latest funding.

Yext is currently only in 12 local categories, including auto repair, chiropractors, gyms, vets, and yoga. There are 2,300 Yellow Pages categories. Lerman is going to take the $25 million and aggressively expand into those categories, hiring sales people to go after each one. He already has 75 employees.

Lerman is also extremely excited about getting Yext numbers into mobile apps. He thinks he can build an AdSense for mobile phones. “What do you think is the perfect action for mobile?”he asks. “It is a phone call, not a click.” App developers who sign up here can freely import Yext numbers into their apps by business type and category. So a travel app could bring up nearby auto garages or window repair shops for stranded travelers and get a cut of any call revenue they generate. Lerman has a lot of ideas like that.

Here is the demo from TC50 that got him $25 million:

Photo credit: TechCrunch/Chanaye Thomas.

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