Email Archiving

Clive Gold, EMC’s director of product marketing, said: “Email archiving is an essential business practice. We have seen huge demand over the last three years. It has also become more available for smaller firms, and at EMC we have a whole practice around back-up and archiving.”

Gold said the main driver behind email archiving demand is quelling the huge growth in unstructured data.

“To keep up with the growth in data we have to get smarter. Compliance and governance is also an important issue, just in case people ask for copies of previous emails.”

Gold said there are tax laws in place which require firms to keep information and much of that information is stored on email.

“To have all that information archived is a huge benefit.”

Gold said EMC has a number of partners that carry aspects of email archiving, with the next big area likely to be file archiving.

“We have enabled our partners to go to customers and look at the amount of data that firm has not looked at for a certain amount of time and give them a profile where they can move that information into archiving, where the cost of keeping that data is [halved].”

Gold said email archiving enables resellers to reach customer base and expand consulting services:“There are partners who have virtually started businesses from this area.”

HP recently flagged its intent in the archiving space after it announced that they have signed a pre-bid agreement to acquire Tower Software, a document and records management software company that is based in Canberra.

The acquisition of Tower will add electronic records management to HP Software’s existing e-discovery and compliance capabilities in information collection and retention. This includes both records management and identification, which have become increasingly important for organisations due to rules and regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.

Speaking at the time of the announcement, Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of information management software at HP, said: “In reaction to increased business regulation, electronic records management has moved from a back-office task to a business-critical function. The combination of the HP and Tower software portfolios is expected to be hugely beneficial to the legal and IT organisations of businesses all over the world.”

Martin Harwood, Tower Software’s CEO, said: “The combination of HP and Tower will allow us to scale and provide our customers with a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise information and IT management software solutions. We have partnered with HP for years, so today’s news is exciting because we will now be able to enhance how we serve our joint customers and partners.”

There was nothing unique about HP’s intent. MessageLabs has also been upping its email archiving game after releasing the MessageLabs Archiving Service last year. The offering deals with all external and internal email and allows speedy access to messages once archived, said the firm. The service includes new attachment stubbing technology, which can reduce the amount of Exchange storage needed by replacing attachments in users’ inboxes with a link to the same document stored in the archive.

In relation to the release, Chris Reid of IT consultancy Morse, said email archiving is gaining importance with IT directors, but with many current systems, the process of locating and restoring archived emails can be “painstakingly laborious”. He added: “Businesses are under increasing pressure from compliance regulations to store all business correspondence for longer periods of time, which means storage needs are increasing exponentially.”

With strong vendor focus and demand on both the compliance and business practice sides, email archiving is a solid bet for resellers. The channel should be encouraged to add email archiving offerings to new sales, alongside approaching their existing customer base for further sales.

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