The fast-moving E-MAIL MANAGEMENT MARKET

Various studies show that up to three-quarters of corporate intellectual property resides within e-mail and messaging systems. E-mail management (EMM)—the monitoring, filtering, storage and management of corporate e-mail and IMs—is a fast-moving, rapidly developing market segment. For about $40 to $80 per desktop, organizations are supporting their compliance and governance efforts while proactively preparing for the discovery process in any potential litigation.

New EMM entrants, acquisitions and product innovations have flooded the market the past year. Driving the growth of this market are the huge increase in e-mail volumes, their importance in regulatory compliance, corporate governance and litigation, and the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) governing the legal discovery process and use of electronic information.

An overview of some of the leading and notable EMM software offerings follows.

AXS-One has been very active in the compliance support marketplace. Its e-mail/IM archiving solution is policy-driven and provides a single interface to disparate corporate content systems. It also presents all information in context, simplifying the needs of companies subject to compliance and oversight regulations. The solution includes integrated functionality for secure, scalable e-mail (and IM) management, including capture and extraction, storage, supervision, filtering and blocking, access, search and retrieval.

AXS-One delivers e-mail message archiving for several e-mail systems including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, Bloomberg Mail and SunOne Messaging. Using configurable options, schedule-based extraction from mail servers is based on time periods to capture messages, minimizing the need for additional support and network infrastructure, and minimizing impact on mail servers. The extraction of e-mail header information (To, From, Cc:, Bcc:, Time and Date, and Subject) is
used for basic indexing and is also completed at that stage.

The company reports more than 130 customer installations, ranging in size from almost 1,000 to 100,000 users. Its customers include: New York Life, Deutsche Bank, Countrywide Financial and Healthnet.

CA Message Manager (formerly Assentor Enterprise from iLumin) is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) enterprise e-mail
and file management system and archiving solution. It offers a broad range of support for e-mail server platforms (an in-house as well as a hosted solution), supporting MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise and other popular e-mail services such as Bloomberg and Oracle Collaboration Suite.

CA Message Manager includes a suite of products: CA Message Manager Archive, CA Message Manager Mailbox Management, CA Message Manager Discovery and CA Message Manager Supervision. Archive captures e-mail and IMs and intelligently indexes the content and manages its retention period with integrated support for mass storage devices. Mailbox Management helps balance users’ needs for archived messages and IT’s need to reduce storage volumes. Messages are automatically archived and stubbed (only a pointer to the entire message is indexed, saving storage space and search time) based on a robust policy manager. Legacy archive files can be migrated into the archive and made accessible for user searching. Discovery creates a workflow solution around the litigation support process. It eliminates the need for IT department involvement to locate and retrieve e-mail from a backup server, allowing legal teams to search, retrieve, refine and analyze content.

EMC is a leader in the marketplace with about 2,300 companies using its EMC E-mailXtender family of products, an almost 50 percent increase over last year’s reported installed base. Its largest customer has deployed more than 55,000 seats of the software. Commenting on the architecture, Stewart Noyce, senior product marketing manager at EMC, says, “We’ve built around the platform of capture and ingestion of messages through the use of a binary format, although when retrieved, all messages are in their native format.”

The E-mailXtender family includes: E-mailXaminer, which provides e-mail content monitoring and supervision to assist in corporate e-mail governance and regulatory compliance; E-mailXtender Archive Edition, which optimizes storage and improves server performance by migrating e-mail messages and attachments into a centralized message archive; and E-mailXtender User Cache, which provides a local cache to enhance the shortcut functionality of E-mailXtender for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and E-mailXtender for Microsoft Exchange.

Fortiva provides a hosted SaaS (“software as a service,” which is commonly referred to as “on-demand”) e-mail archiving service for regulatory compliance and legal discovery. CEO Eric Goodwin draws a distinction between SaaS and traditional hosted systems. “SaaS implementations offer the economy of multitenant architecture, and in general tend to have tighter integration and ease of deployment,” he says.

The pay-as-you-go service looks like it is locally installed to the user. Fortiva’s Archiving Suite is strictly an archive-only solution that automatically captures and indexes all internal and external messages for redundant offsite storage. Users access archived data within Outlook or a Web browser with guaranteed search performance. Fortiva also guarantees data privacy through its DoubleBlind Encryption technology, offering customers the data security and control of an
in-house solution without having to manage the data.

MessageSolution offers a multiplatform solution, and its Enterprise E-mail Archiving (EEA) Linux is the first e-mail archiving solution launched to the market that native-supports the Linux operating system. MessageSolution reports over 100 customers using its software; its largest is a 30,000-user implementation at a university that is archiving 20 GB to 30 GB per day. EEA Suite and the scaled down EEA Express are an archive-oriented set of functions that help organizations improve performance and scalability of e-mail servers while providing secured access to archived messages. With permissions, an entire message archive can be searched.

EEA StorageVault stores every important message, and the data can be readily accessed and restored in case of failure on the client’s primary e-mail server.

“We have an explosion of content in the marketplace, and it’s causing chaos in the enterprise,” says T.M. Ravi, president and