Iron Mountain Inc.: An Overview Of The Information And Asset Storage Company

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Iron Mountain Inc. is an America based enterprise that stores, manages and protects information and assets. The headquarters of this company is in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a public listed company, listed its name in New York Stock Exchange as NYSE:IRM. In 1951, Herman Knaust was founded this company. The initial task of this company was to grow and sale mushrooms and for doing this, he purchased a depleted iron ore worth $9000 along with 100 acres of land in 1936 to cultivate mushroom by large amount. However, the market of mushroom shifted in 1950 and consequently the founder decided to start a new business, where he could utilize this iron mine (Ironmountain.com). Thus, Knaust named his company as “Iron Mountain”. The company was known as “Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation” and in 1951; it started its first underground vaults. The first customer of this Iron Mountain was East River Savings Bank. The bank purchased microfilm copies of duplicate signature cards and deposit records. The first aboveground record-storage facility of Iron Mountain was started in New York in 1978. After 1980, this company expanded its business beyond this city and opened its new site in New England for providing service to protect computer back up data. 

The vision of Iron Mountain is to be one of the trusted guardians of their customers’ information and assets.

The mission of this company is to work with customers to manage the risks and complexity of today and tomorrow by protecting, understanding and transforming what matters most.

Thus, the value of this company is related to their work. those can be summarised as follows:

• Build customer value
• Own safety and security
• Take ownership
• Promote teamwork and inclusion

They reflect their values through their thinking, actions, interactions with customers and in the communities, where they conduct their business.

  Iron Mountain has supplied information, data backup and other recovery services to more than 220000 customers across Europe, North America, Africa, Latin America and Asia. In 2016, total number of employees was more than 24000 while total number of locations of this company was more than 1400 across 50 countries during this year. Moreover, total amount of assets and revenue of iron Mountain were USD 9.5 billion and USD 3.5 billion, respectively during the same year.

Iron Mountain operates under industry of Information Storage and Enterprise Information Management (EIM). EIM is a part of information technology and tries to find optimal solution to use information within an organization.

Iron Mountain has several competitors among which three strong competitors are EVault, Autonomy and iBackup.

EVault: Iron Mountain cannot provide backup tapes that are required for a complete restoration. In this context, EVault can be important for getting comparatively viable solution to meet customers’ requirement.

Autonomy: Many big companies such as HP do not think that Iron Mountain can sell out enough digital assets to Autonomy. Autonomy, on the contrary, helps organizations to store data effectively instead of this they also help those organizations by providing greater understanding of data.

iBackup: This company gives basic data backup to their customers that Iron Mountain cannot provide. They give free services for first two weeks with huge amount of information storage. For instance, the company is providing its promotional offer by providing 500 GB for $ 9.95 monthly (Ibackup.com).

Company History

Iron Mountain realizes the importance and value of its customers for which it adopts a customer-centric strategy. Through formal marketing programs, the company takes initiatives to modify its existing customers. The leader of this company has taken a customer marketing program since 2013 for engaging and better understanding their customers (Williams). This program helps the company to lead more business and improve their experience.

4 Ps of marketing strategy includes product, price, place and promotion and this strategy is called marketing mix. Those of Iron Mountain are described below:

Product: Product means an item, which satisfies needs or wants of consumers. The company provides various types of services to their customers and those are digital transformation, information management, and secure destruction and storage. Under digital transformation, the company provides cloud data management, imaging services, data centers, media restoration, migration, and workflow automation. With the help of this service, a company can become digitally mature and consequently can improve business agility with better use and access of information. Information management provides services like retention and privacy policy management, reporting and inventory management, information governance advisory services and software escrow. Those services help a company to control its complex industrial landscape. Secure destruction helps to dispose a company’s media, records and assets securely. This provides services like secure shredding, destruction projects and secured e-waste and it asset disposition. Secure storage, on the other side, helps a company to protect and preserve important documents like critical business information, original recording of artists and other information, which are essential to conduct business.  Secure storage also provides services like record and media storage, marketing fulfillment and industry specific storage.

Price: Price means the amount that a customer pays to buy a product. Taking proper price strategy is essential for the product selling company, as lower price can attract more customers compare to higher prices. Iron Mountain charges lower prices to store data compare to other storage companies. Thus, this low price strategy helps this company to increase its strong customer base and to sustain in the market with other competitors. Iron Mountain offers complete data protection, records management and information destruction to its customers.

Place: Place is also an important factor that helps a company to increase its business. It constructs direct and indirect channels to market that are convenient for consumers to provide services. Initially, the company has started its business in the New York City market. Later, the company has expanded its business in Boston, England. At present, the company has its branches in Australia, India, Singapore, Thailand and other main cities across the world. Iron Mountain chooses market areas for its business and those storage have become convenient for customers. The target market of Iron Mountain can be divided into various sectors, which are banking, energy, entertainment, health care and Federal Government. The company also deals with other small businesses and retails. Thus, companies like Professional Alternative Inc., SunGard Availability Services, Watson Clinic and others store their data in Iron Mountain.

Promotion: Promotion means marketing communications that include advertisement, sales promotion and direct marketing and public relation. Iron Mountain uses its official website through which customers can know about this company. The company promotes its services to customers and others with the help of social media like facebook, LinkedIn, Tweeter and so on. This implies that Iron Mountain applies modern technologies to promote its business.

Vision and Mission

Figure 2: Annual revenues of Iron Mountain Inc,

Source: (Statista)

The above figure represents annual data of iron Mountain over last seven years from 2010 to 2016. According this figure, annual revenue of this company has varied by small amount during these years. However, after 2015, the company has earned huge amount of revenue in 2016 and it has increased in the next year, as well. However, due to increasing costs, annual income of this company has decreased in 2016 by USD 104.8 million (Ironmountain.com). However, with the help of its annual report, it is seen that the company is profitable.

President and CEO: The president and CEO of this company is William Meaney, who serves as a director on the board of this company.  Before taking this position, he was served as CEO of the Zuellig Group.  Meaney is a member of the Asia Business Council.

Chief Financial Officer: Stuart Brown is the Executive Vice President and chief financial officer (CFO) of the Iron Mountain Company.

Chief Technological Officer: The chief technological officer (CTO) of the Iron Mountain Company is Fidelma Russo.

Strength: The Company has free cash flows that help the company to expand its various projects. The company has strong base of reliable suppliers related to raw material. Automation related to activities have brought a standard of quality for this company’s products. Moreover, the company has highly skilled and trained workers.

Weakness:   The Company needs more upgraded technologies for storing data. For this, Iron Mountain requires more investment. The company has comparatively high attrition rate within its work force compare to its competitors. Moreover, the company cannot control its current situation and consequently losses its market share.

Opportunities: The government of U.S provides an opportunity to the state and Federal government to procure incorporated products of Iron Mountain. New market structure can expand new business dimension of this company and this in turn can help this company to increase net income by large (Cowling). With the help of online channels and social media, the company can increase its customer base significantly. Political stability is various countries along with developing economic condition of England, Australia and New Zealand along with India, Malaysia and Thailand have helped Iron Mountain to expand its business rapidly.

Threats: Iron Mountain has many competitors in market. Those companies are trying to provide similar services with comparatively lower costs but with more facilities. Thus, total number strong customers of this company can be decreased in future. The company requires more investment to adopt modern technologies for storing data. However, new income of this company has decreased in recent years due to increasing amount of net cost. 

The company is predicted to grow over the next year and consequently its earnings per share (EPS) can increase by 63.35%. At present, EPS of Iron Mountain is $0.733 and it is expected that the rate can increase further to $1.198 in coming years. According to market analysts, its stock price can increase within six months. Moreover, revenue of this company can increase as well in next two years.

Iron Mountain has some of its critical success factors on which the company needs to focus as those factors can help the company to sustain in future. Firstly, the company can emerge its trends and information challenges. Secondly, Iron Mountain can focus on its retention challenges to solve its growing confusion to keep information securely. Thirdly, the company can focus on information access and storage for an international business. Lastly, the company can improve its maintenance of digital data as online communications are increasing rapidly.  Thus, in future, importance of digital can be increased significantly.

References:

Annual revenues of Iron Mountain Inc, from 2010 to 2017 (in million U.S. dollars) Exclusive Premium Statistic. "Iron Mountain Inc: Annual Revenue 2010-2017 | Statistic." Statista. N. p., 2018. Web. 2 July 2018.

Williams, Amy J., et al. "Preserved filamentous microbial biosignatures in the Brick Flat gossan, Iron Mountain, California." Astrobiology 15.8 (2015): 637-668.

Cowling, Clare. "Legal Records at Risk: Does the Legal Profession Care about Preserving its Heritage? And What Could be Done to Rescue Private Sector Legal Records?." Legal Information Management 16.3 (2016): 177-183.

"Ibackup® - Online Backup For Small Business." Ibackup.com. N. p., 2018. Web. 2 July 2018.

"Iron Mountain." Ironmountain.com. N. p., 2018. Web. 2 July 2018.