Actiance introduces latest version of Vantage

Behold Vantage 2013, the latest version of a platform from Actiance Inc.
Methinks this is a particularly rosy little niche for firms selling their wares to financial services businesses.
I continue to get wind of rollouts and deals signed between these technology providers primarily to broker-dealers.
Actiance is one among a number of technology firms, consultancies, or both that specialize in social media archiving, compliance monitoring — including supervision of content generation — and, oh, by the way, why not throw in e-mail and instant messaging oversight too.
Vantage is the firm’s flagship product and is powered by the Actiance Governance Platform.
With this latest version, organizations have expanded capabilities in managing their compliance, retention and security policies for many different communications channels. That includes enterprise social software, public instant messaging networks and unified communications
Among the specific applications, this release helps support, with additional features, different unified communications platforms that are popular among enterprise and SME customers: Microsoft’s Lync, IBM and its own Connections 4.5 and the increasingly popular Jive platform (from Jive Communications Inc.).
The Vantage platform already supported management and retention of BlackBerry devices and various instant messaging platforms as well as Microsoft’s Sharpoint product.
In today’s prepared statement, Actiance noted that its governance platform is used by all 10 of the top 10 banks in the U.S. as well as several in Europe and Canada.
While Vantage is employed to governance and compliance, Actiance has a separate platform that handles social media content called Socialite, which was first rolled out in 2011. Its Engage module is an additional add-on for firms to create and share as well as preapprove and manage content.
There are quite a few competitors to the Actiance offerings either in whole or in part including but not limited to those of Erado, Hearsay Social, RegEd, Smarsh and Socialware.
Comparing these goes far beyond the scope of this post but, such a piece is on my road map for later in the year.
Most recently, I wrote about a platform under construction at RegEd, which will be called Score for Compliance, and is expected to share some overlapping features with both Actiance’s Socialite Engage and Vantage platforms.

Related stories:
Actiance to launch Socialite Engage; A measuring stick for social media efforts in addition to pre-approval, tracking and archiving
Raymond James makes its social-media move [adopts Socialite platform]
Social media compliance, a small but growing sector in the advisory economy