Founded in 2017, Santa Barbara, CA-headquartered Theta Lake is coming up to a decade in existence. The company in this time has gone from strength-to-strength, setting its stall out as a leader in the digital communications, governance and archiving (DCGA) space. How is the firm evolving for the future?
Theta Lake has grown to become a product leader since its establishment. A key part of not only thriving but standing out amongst the competition is being able to not just keep pace with other market players, but to be able to blaze new trails. How does Theta Lake do this?
According to Dan Nadir, chief product officer at Theta Lake, there are three areas that explain the firm’s ability to keep strong here. First of all, he raises that company’s heavily experienced engineering team – who have been able to build all of the built-in integrations to date.
Also, the company has built close partnerships with a number of leading vendors such as Zoom, Cisco, Microsoft and RingCentral, with Zoom, Cisco and RingCentral being leading investors in Theta Lake. Nadir highlighted that Theta Lake works closely with these firms to understand their roadmap and understand what new capabilities they’re releasing and how they can be scheduled into Theta Lake’s roadmap.
“Another big reason we’re able to keep pace is because we’ve built our tools on top of a platform that has loads of common services and provides a number of open, documented APIs,” said Nadir. “When someone is creating a new integration, not only do they have the know-how and experience to build, but they’re not reinventing the wheel for lots of components that all these integrations need.”
Nadir stressed on this point that through Theta Lake’s platform, its engineers can build them, customers can build them, and so can third parties. “It makes it much quicker to develop the kind of technology that we deploy to support all these new features and innovations that come out of these platforms,” he said.
Out-of-the-box vs platform approach
A key question for many in the communications space is how customers choose between using the user interface “out of the box” and the platform approach. How does Nadir see this?
“What we see is that the vast majority of our customers just use the out-of-the-box option,” he said. “They’re either going to use us to capture content and send it to their third party archive of record, or they want an all-in-one solution that will enable them to capture all of this content and just store it, make it easy to retain and supervise.”
According to Nadir, many customers just use the existing supported capabilities, but there are some who want more advanced capabilities – and for this, they can use the APIs, for example, as part of the platform to do things like user management or reconciliation, or potentially to create their own integration for small, bespoke applications written years ago.
A deep dive into DCGA
The idea for DCGA – Digital Communications Governance and Archiving – is relatively new as a space, and in the words of Nadir, is an evolution of the old school email archiving and supervision world. “Gartner had been releasing a Magic Quadrant for that space for a while, but I think they recognised that with UCC, you need to do things and manage things a different way.”
With this considered, Nadir explained that Gartner’s DCGA report is an acknowledgement that firms need to look at new and different solutions and gave an example.
“This doesn’t really apply in the email archiving world, but if you deploy meetings from your vendor and have 100 regulated users and they do just a single meeting each day, that means every day, you could create 50-100 hours of audio and/or video to be supervised. I think most of the legacy archive vendors can’t physically support that kind of content, and even if they could, it’s a daunting task to try to layer on top of that supervision or e-discovery,” said Nadir.
Embracing DCGA
Is it a big effort for organisations to embrace DCGA? In this area, Nadir stated that Theta Lake has a lot of customers who are trying to capture new content they haven’t had before – so if they want to keep all of this content in their archive of record, even if it isn’t Theta Lake, they can do that.
He continued, “We can integrate with the platforms, we can pull in the content, we can analyse it, we can add metadata to it and we can send it on its way to their legacy environment. Many will decide that they ultimately want to have a time frame for getting off of that legacy environment, so they want to store content with us, maybe in parallel.
“Sometimes they’ll realize that the legacy solutions just don’t really exist to do cloud, audio or video and meetings well, , and so they’ll keep that content inside of Theta Lake, even as they continue to forward other types into their legacy environment,” said Nadir.
Nadir explained that the company doesn’t push them one way or another – and that everyone is in a different place along their journey to the cloud, so Theta Lake will meet them where they are to be able to deliver just what they need at that time.
Microsoft and Purview
A similar development to what Theta Lake is doing in terms of capturing and retaining critical business records can sound fairly similar to what Microsoft does with its Purview offering. Microsoft claims its Purview solutions provide integrated coverage and help address the fragmentation of data across organizations, the lack of visibility that hampers data protection and governance, and the blurring of traditional IT management roles.
For Nadir, whilst there is certainly some overlap, Purview is built-in, so everyone who is leveraging the Microsoft platform has access to Purview.
He said, “Our customers tend to rely on not just capture, but they want to use us for policy analysis, they want us to look for problematic content, they want us to make content available for review and supervision, and they need to store it in different geographical locations. There are lots of different reasons why they would want a solution that has sort of broader capabilities.”
Nadir explained that Theta Lake’s mission is to be able to consume Microsoft content, but any other platform as well. “There’s a bit of overlap, but we don’t tend to see that the same users who are interested in Purview for what it can do are not also interested in the additional capabilities that we provide, our value lies in our ability to augment and extend Purview’s capabilities, he said.
Emerging customer concerns
What are some of the emerging customer concerns in terms of communications risks? For Nadir, there are two key areas that stand out.
He remarked,” The first one that we see every day is that the business is not getting the ROI out of the communications tools that they have purchased, and the users are not getting the benefit of all of these capabilities that exist in these platforms.” Nadir stressed that the reason for this is typically because the business wants to use it but the compliance team is concerned, and they don’t want to create a compliance gap.
“We view ourselves as an enabling technology,” said Nadir. “We can work hand-in-hand between the business and the compliance team and show them both that you can enable all of these capabilities in a compliant way. As a result, there is usually an agreement that the business can turn on all of these capabilities with the blessing of compliance that has the ability to do the kinds of supervision and oversight they really need to do.
Another area of emerging concern is a topic that has been discussed heavily for almost three years now – AI. Specifically for Nadir the concerns center on how to manage and control the tools currently in use, where a firm rolls out an AI capability.
He said, “For example, many customers are nervous about what data these AI tools have access to, they’re nervous about what kinds of questions their employees are asking and what kind of results they are getting back. Many of them don’t want to turn on these capabilities until they have better control over them.”
Nadir then touched on the general usage of AI as a concern. “Who’s using it? How good is it, can I use an AI companion tool that I get, that I use for summarisation of a call or a meeting? There are other questions around accuracy, and how compliance works with tools that create AI generated content.
“But again, for us, we’re just the enabler technology for all of this. We can make sure we can capture prompts and responses, and we can help control what settings you have for various kinds of tools. We use AI in our own tools, and we provide explainability and transparent AI that explains clearly why something was flagged as potentially risky, what it was and exactly why we thought that it was risky,” summarised Nadir.
Recent developments
As for recent developments for Theta Lake that stand out as particularly prescient, the company’s recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant and associated Critical Capabilities report take the spotlight.
Nadir explained, “The report highlights the capabilities that we have and shines a light on how we’re able to do things differently and better than a lot of the legacy players. For example, in analytics and internal insights, we scored number one, in regulatory compliance, we scored number one. We also scored number one in investigations; in spite of the fact there’s tools that have been out there for 20 years to do this.
“We also scored number two in archiving and retention, which was the basis for the original Magic Quadrant. Overall, we placed fourth in the final capability of User Governance. These top scores are very big news for us,” he continued.
In the view of Nadir, this was key as a lot of enterprises rely on Gartner for advice and feedback, and its good validation for Theta Lake that technology it has built over the past 7-8 years was built for the future, and not, in Nadir’s words, created out of code that has been around for 25 years.
Another big development for Theta Lake has been that the company’s platform is open and available to customers and partners. “We’ve already got partner vendors that have built on top of our platform and are delivering applications that connect their data created by their apps with the Theta Lake platform,” said Nadir.
The firm is also working on deeply integrating with Purview, so that users can be using Purview but can see into Theta Lake for analysis of data.
Nadir concluded, “We’ll do that with other leading platforms as well. We want to be able to expose this data for analytics and report generation, so I think making it fully available outside of our own engineers is really big news.”
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