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.
Read the full interview with Theta Lake CPO Dan Nadir.
