Actiance moves social-media archiving to the cloud

Social-media-technology firm Actiance Inc. on Monday announced the launch of Alcatraz, a cloud-based archive that lets financial firms track conversations across social media and determine whether they are compliant. Alcatraz’s “context-aware” governance platform sits between users and communication networks, tracking conversations and deals as they happen via social-media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook as well as voice calls, e-mails and instant messaging. Scott Whitney, Actiance’s vice president of product management, said the active compliance review that Alcatraz offers is designed to stop the sort of “persistent chat” that went on between financial firms during the 2012 Libor interest-rate-rigging scandal. “We sit in the middle and record all the chat that’s going by,” he said, adding that Alcatraz allows trading-floor supervisors to block “money in motion” events that don’t meet acceptable use policies. Alcatraz is now in beta with a couple of large banks and will be available in April. The cost will be a flat fee of $7 per month per user. The new archive retains and retrieves social-media content, including edits and deletions. Alcatraz follows the thread of an online conversation and can reproduce the context of that conversation and link it to e-mails. It also can replicate what a blog or discussion board looked like at a particular point in time.