What do you do as an acquiring company when you buy a strong brand?  At one extreme, you swallow it whole and relabel everything on Day One, risking the loss of goodwill and brand-awareness which is part of what you paid for, but boosting your own presence in the market. At the other, you carry on as if nothing has changed except the ownership, preserving the name with which your market is familiar. Car manufacturers, banks and law firms provide examples from other areas of business where judgements have been made one way or the other. Quite often, iconic names are preserved in a division or a product line. Sometimes it is not evident that there is a strategy.

It was always clear what Iron Mountain’s strategy was with its acquisition of ediscovery company Stratify and its subsequent addition of email archive specialist Mimosa Systems. Iron Mountain already dominated the paper archive market, and the two acquisitions fitted neatly into a presumed plan to bring corporations’ entire archiving and document-handling under one roof and one strong brand. More than two years on from the Stratify acquisition, we are seeing that logic working through into the branding. The Stratify and Mimosa web sites still occupy their former domains, but the sites are clearly branded as Iron Mountain sites. My messages from people at Stratify now bear Iron Mountain email addresses; the Stratify tagline “Know what you have” is disappearing, and we wait to see what use is made in the future of the familiar name on the company’s products.

From the outside, the overlap and continuity from paper handling and storage looks a sensible way of building on the Iron Mountain brand and, more importantly perhaps, its footprint (sometimes of long standing) in many companies. There is more to this than the fact that the company may already have its foot in the door, a point made clear from the recent announcement of the appointment of Russell Sanderson as Commercial Director for Professional Services Sector in the UK . The key section reads:

With the paper-intensive nature of the professional services sector, a major part of his new role involves helping customers manage the transition from a physical to a digital environment, applying the most effective solutions from Iron Mountain’s broad services portfolio. Sanderson will also help customers make sense of the information they hold and drive efficiencies through improved business processes and programmes to reduce long term storage costs.

That “broad services portfolio” is what the recent acquisitions represent – not just free-standing businesses with their own rationale, but the means of helping companies move from paper to digital archiving. The world is clearly going in that direction anyway, and Iron Mountain’s decision to ride that wave makes more sense than just watching its historic business dry up – although paper has been “an unconscionable time dying” as Charles II said apologetically of himself.

Stratify’s name was made in big cases – it was one of the systems (CaseLogistix was the other) used by Lehmans’ Adminstrator, for example. Part of the logic behind its eVantage on-premise early case assessment appliance and the pricing structure behind its Legal Discovery OnPoint review offering is to broaden its scope to include a wider range of matters, including ones smaller than Stratify is generally used for.

I have not yet had the chance to look at these products properly – “looking at” in my terms implies more than just gazing at screenshots, and the opportunity to talk to the right people at Stratify has evaded me for the good reason that they seem rather busy. My own travels wind down shortly, and the chance to find out more should arise soon.

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