News
Dedham, MA
May 5, 2005
Antipreneurial: New Word for a New Era?
In the 1980s, the key word was entrepreneurial. In the 1990s, it was intrapreneurial. In 2005, will it be…antipreneurial?
What is “antipreneurship?”
“It means taking the initiative to avoid risks and eliminate threats to the most valuable communications resource of an enterprise, its email,” explains the man who coined the term, Mr. Lance Urbas, president and CEO of IntelliReach, the email lifecycle management software company in Dedham, Massachusetts.
“To be antipreneurial with enterprise email, you need to oppose threats to your messaging systems: Anti-virus. Anti-spam. Anti-spitzer…”
Wait a sec. “Anti-spitzer?” As in, NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer? Yes, IntelliReach also coined the term “anti-spitzer” as shorthand for you-had-better-comply-with-email-safeguards-and-security-regulations.
In a Wall Street Journal advertisement, IntelliReach featured Rodin’s sculpture of “The Thinker” wondering, “Am I being antipreneurial enough with my email? Anti-virus? Anti-spam? Anti-spitzer?” The ad didn’t define “anti-spitzer” (note that Spitzer is not capitalized; it’s a generic term), it just offered this guarantee: “We can ensure that your enterprise is in compliance with email privacy and security regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC 17a-4, HIPAA and GLBA.”
Does the concept of managing, archiving, and protecting email merit its own word? Mr. Lance Urbas thinks so.
Email has been growing exponentially, replacing ‘snail mail’ and other messaging as the preferred means of business communication. Research shows that around 70% of an organization’s intellectual property resides in its email system.
The next generation of antipreneurial expertise will be in leveraging information gained from studying patterns of email—as data mining experts do in modeling other data—to improve office workflow and knowledge management. Email is knowledge. It is knowledge about one’s employees, customers, products and services. We’ve only begun to explore what can be learned from enterprise email. Archeologists and historians will one day sift through email as they dig through layers of soil in an excavation. In the meantime, the anti’s matter:
Anti-virus. An email system needs the protection of anti-virus software and frequent updates to ensure that you can stop new viruses, worms, and Trojan Horses.
Anti-spam. Up to 75% of all email is spam. Sophisticated content and spam filters can thwart the latest spamming techniques. Using lexical scanning, predictive analysis, and heuristic scoring to inspect the header, body, and attachments of each email, filters can stop spam at the gateway before they do damage by consuming bandwidth and disk space.
Anti-spitzer. Software can ensure that a company is in full compliance with email privacy and security regulations. Many organizations fail to keep emails accessible or in a manner consistent with mandated regulations for retention and storage. Executives increasingly realize that email not properly managed creates serious risks and costs.
Anti-disaster. Archiving email enables an organization to rapidly respond to disasters—natural, technological, or hacker-induced. By storing, indexing, and organizing email and Instant Messages, and keeping them easily accessible, archiving is a practical solution, says Mr. Urbas.
“Entrepreneur” derives from the French, entreprendre: to undertake. To be entrepreneurial means to assume the risks in undertaking a venture. Risk is also integral to being an “intrapreneur,” someone who takes risks in undertaking ventures within a company. Mr. Urbas says “antipreneurial” is about avoiding risks. “It means taking the initiative to eliminate threats to your messaging systems.”
In promoting concepts like “antipreneurship” and “anti-sptizer,” Mr. Urbas says IntelliReach is “trying to help define what email is all about.”
IntelliReach is also trying to help define how the word “e-mail” should be spelled—with or without a hyphen. IntelliReach created SamPoll.com 
to settle the question once and for all. It posts arguments pro and con and invites people to vote for their preference. After 10,000 votes are in, the results will be announced to the e-world (or eworld).
About IntelliReach
IntelliReach is the email lifecycle management company. The Company’s unique integration of email security, administration and storage enables enterprises of all sizes to improve productivity while simultaneously reducing security risks and ensuring compliance with evolving government regulations. IntelliReach supports a broad range of messaging environments, including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and other popular platforms. Founded in 1998, IntelliReach is privately held and headquartered in Dedham, Mass. For more information, please contact IntelliReach at www.intellireach.com.