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E-mail Archiving and Management Research by CMSWatch

May 21, 2008 By 1 Comment

E-mail Archiving and Management (EAM) technologies archive the contents of mail servers into a centrally-managed repository. EAM technology has become critical to both commercial and government enterprises — but for a variety of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. This has led to a similarly diverse set of approaches from EAM suppliers, according to research released today by CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

Long considered an inconvenient backwater by many enterprises, recent developments have elevated the importance of e-mail archiving and management, including:

  • Highly visible scandals such as the White House losing up to 5,000,000 e-mails
  • Increased use of e-mails as evidence in corporate trials
  • IT’s growing concerns over the cost and complexity of managing huge volumes of mail on the network
The logic to consolidate, sort, and index all mail into a single long-term archive is simple. Although EAM tools can be expensive, field experience suggests that successful deployments can yield a fast return on the investment.


These findings come from E-mail Archiving and Management Report 2008, released today. This groundbreaking report evaluates fourteen major EAM suppliers, based on extensive technology research and customer interviews. The 195-page report also provides a breakdown of common usage scenarios to help with selecting an EAM system.

Yet the tension between IT’s need to optimize back-up, recovery, and archiving on the one hand — and Legal and HR’s need for better policy management and e-discovery on the other — is reflected in a marketplace where vendors tend to favor one approach over the other. “The entry of industry heavyweights Google, Dell, HP, EMC, and IBM into this space has not commoditized the technology,” notes Pelz-Sharpe, “in part because they all see different opportunities in the market and have adopted different architectures.”


“Enterprises looking to deal with e-mail chaos need to tread carefully. It’s not just architectures that vary widely — pricing is all over the map too,” argues CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne. “Finding a vendor that meets your needs and your budget requires careful research and comparison of disparate options,” concludes Byrne.

The report also found mixed messages in the customer community:

  • Global buyers of EAM are motivated more by server and storage optimization of Exchange and Notes environments, and less by the regulatory, legal, and e-discovery concerns that predominate among major enterprises in North America
  • Buyers maintain quite polarized views on Software as a Service (SaaS) approaches, with some enterprises going exclusively this route to avoid infrastructure investments and maintenance, while many others consider hosted EAM a non-starter for corporate e-mail
The report may be purchased at http://www.cmswatch.com/E-mail/Report/, where readers can also download a sample excerpt.
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Comments

  1. Ronnie Lastella says:
    February 11, 2009 at 9:18 am

    Email archiving is definately the way to go!

    In our company after implementing a tool called archive manager we were able to notice a significant reduction in e-mail storage size.

    Using special compression technologies and by storing only one copy of messages and attachments, archive manager can really save a lot of diskspace.

    Reply

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