Enron – A legacy as proving ground for Lookeen

Enron started of perfectly: The fusion of Houston Natural Gas and Internorth formed Enron back in 1985. Soon after the fusion, they became the biggest natural gas distributor in the USA and Great Britain. Changes in the top management and planned projects in India allowed the shares to climb between December 2000 and August 2001 from $ 20 to over $100 a piece. But in autumn 2001 Enron had to admit, that they had financial problems and turned to the Department of Commerce. An audit was issued and under growing pressure, Enron was forced to provide a revised version of the quarterly financial statement and the result was devastating: The revised statement showed that there was a loss of more then half a billion U.S. dollars. Enron had to admit to fraudulent claims of more then 1.2 Billion U.S. dollars in the previous year. As a result the shares fell so deep, that they were taken of the stock market in December.

Enron was ruined. The crash of Enron left more then 20.000 employees jobless, with their retirement provisions and their savings in form of Enron shares gone. The trial following the crash handed out penalties and prison sentences to managers and accountant clerks, but was unable to retrieve the money lost.

To avoid this happening again, the SEC and the controlling institution for energy trade published a cleaned up data file of Enron, containing 500.000 Emails in may 2002. This data is used for analysing and testing purposes of universities and companies. Among the resulting projects is the SimStudent-Project of the Carnegie Mellon University, another is a publication of the School of Computing in Queens.

What has that got to do with Lookeen?

A data file with the size of the Enron-File is in a lot of companies rather common today, especially because of the increased E-Mail traffic. Corporate projects, increased correspondence and, unfortunately, Spam-Mails are causing the mail accounts of the associates to overflow regularly. The search for the right mail, the proper annex, relevant documents, pictures or presentations on an exchange server, on mobile data carriers or the hard drive needs more and more time.

Therefore the quality management of Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH used the publicly available Data Package of Enron as a test bench to run Lookeen through last tests and to gain structured testing protocols. The task is, to search and index the file with a size of six GB within an acceptable timeframe. Lookeen can be tested under conditions as they are in Companies: reliability, speed and quality are tested over and over again and improved if necessary.