Email Archiving

E-mail active archiving products continue to add functionality to meet new market demands. Solutions are available to meet basic and complex requirements at a corresponding range in price.

The growing size of e-mail data stores, coupled with the requirement to retain e-mail records for regulatory compliance and legal discovery, has created a market for e-mail active-archiving tools. Gartner estimates that the worldwide e-mail active-archiving market was $376 million in new software license revenue and maintenance services in 2007, an increase of 33.7% over 2006. The market is expected to grow to $1.7 billion by 2012 .

An e-mail active-archiving product provides a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time. It can be used independently or as part of a corporate records repository for legal and business uses. It also can be used as a solution to reduce the size of production e-mail data stores to gain operational efficiencies (reduce backup time, improve recovery and eliminate the need for quotas while still keeping the active data store lean). This research focuses on the market for products. Some companies may decide to outsource their e-mail archiving requirements, and the options available this year have expanded and have become more robust

Symantec remains the only vendor in the Leaders quadrant. Its Enterprise Vault product has evolved into an integrated content archiving platform with the largest worldwide base of e-mail archiving customers and a large, fast-growing base for its file archiving solution. Symantec also delivers its own archiving solution for SharePoint and instant messaging and links into other archiving repositories and leading records management products.

Source: Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving, May 2008, ( "Dataquest Insight: E-Mail Archiving Software Market, Worldwide, 2008,"Outsourcing E-Mail Archiving, 1Q08, Update")