What is e-mail archiving and management?

Clearly, most buyers have neither the time nor the interest to manage complex mail management policies—regardless of the penalties—and simply want blanket retention policies and a permanent archive. At the same time, in some highly regulated sectors, such as brokerages, the need for granular policy management of messages and message content requires a more sophisticated approach. We believe it is too early to determine how important e-discovery will become to this industry.

At the moment, it fills every discussion with vendors. With buyers, however, it tends to fall on deaf ears. Whether the hype will transfer to the market remains an open question.

Hosted vs. on-site

Hosted options for EAM appear to be growing in popularity, particularly among the SME buyers. Larger enterprises, however, remain reluctant to host archived mail outside their walls. In our research, we were surprised by how often those enterprises told us that "hosting is unacceptable" or "hosting is simply not an option." The deep hostility applies particularly to hosting e-mails. At the other end of the spectrum, small and medium-sized firms have embraced the hosted option in recent years.

We expect that division in the market to remain, but you should not see it as prescriptive. That is, your small enterprise may have a good reason to purchase an on-premise product, while your large enterprise may truly value a hosted EAM service.

Global market outlook

The EAM market varies noticeably around the world. In Asia, EAM sits very low on enterprise agendas and shows little sign of picking up. The fast-growing European market focuses on server and storage optimization of Exchange (or Notes) environments. While in the United States, compliance and legal readiness drive the market.

Many vendors believe that others will follow the U.S. market. They assert that e-discovery will spread from a U.S.-only phenomenon into Europe. We don’t see the evidence to support that thesis. Europe has long been heavily regulated—in some regards far more so than the United States—but people and firms in Europe are far less litigious and the courts don’t tend to make unreasonable and costly demands on defendants to produce evidence.

In fact, we see the reverse trend. Compliance and legal preparedness resonate in the heavily regulated sectors in the United States, while server and storage optimization have grown in importance across all sectors.

For more information on the e-mail archiving and management report, go to http://www.cmswatch.com/e-mail/report.