Email Archiving Services Trend Up

Posted by Mary Jander on October 12, 2007

Tags: Backup & Recovery,  Storage Management

Channel: Backup & Recovery, Storage & Mgmt

Managed email archiving services are growing in popularity as rapidly as standalone email archiving products, indicating that a growing number of users are willing to forgo perceived control over email archiving and get somebody else to do it.

According to analyst Laura DuBois of IDC, hosted services now comprise 40 percent of an overall email archiving market that reached $477 million in 2006 revenues. And while the ratio of services to email archiving products isn't clearly changing, spending on services will grow just as fast as product spending -- over 40 percent this year, IDC expects.

"Some users have compared services to products and find it economically more viable to go with the hosted approach," she says. The shorter implementation time, truly imperative when litigation looms, often tips the scales in favor of services, she notes. Still, she says companies like Zantaz that can offer both software and services probably stand the most to gain in the market.

Not long ago, it wasn't clear that choosing to outsource email was necessarily cheaper than doing it yourself. But a growing roster of suppliers, including Zantaz (recently sold to Autonomy for $375 million, Fortiva, LiveOffice, MessageOne, and MessageOne resellers IBM, Iron Mountain, and Sungard, all claim the tables are turning.