On Message with Ben Gross

 
Email archiving one of the fastest growing segments of the messaging market, and a standard part of most large corporate systems. More than 30 vendors now offer email archiving products and services, but three of them — EMC, Symantec, and Zantaz — currently account for more than half of all sales according to Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based consulting firm (disclosure: I’m am a contractor there).

While overall sales for email archiving products haven’t yet cracked $1 billion per year, Ferris Research puts the market in 2009 at $1.3 billion, and GartnerGroup notes that sales more than doubled between 2003 and 2004.
 
In a recent survey of 485 organizations, the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) of Milford, Mass. found three primary reasons for purchase to be to improve compliance with regulatory record retention mandates (61% of respondents); to improve litigation support capabilities (61%); and to reduce storage management complexity (57%).

The market is still largely untapped, but all types of archiving capacity are increasing rapidly  ”About 28 percent of the large organizations we surveyed had an email archiving system in place, and we expect digital archive capacity will increase nearly tenfold between 2005 and 2010, from 2,786 petabytes (PB) in 2005 to 27,206 PB in 2010,” says Brian Babineau, a Palo Alto-based research analyst with ESG.  “About ten percent of that is email.”
 
Surprisingly, neither IBM nor Microsoft has made much effort in the email archiving market. Whether they will be content to leave archiving to third party vendors, as they have with anti-spam appliances, or whether they will decide archiving is core infrastructure remains to be seen.
 
Going forward, technologies that can capture IM, documents, and VoIP calls seem likely to be folded into email archiving solutions. In addition, traditional file back up vendors are also looking to email archiving as a fast growing line of business, and enterprise content management vendors will also target the space.

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