Email Archives Arrive

Email archiving is growing into a multibillion-dollar market, and storage vendors are hustling to cash in.

This week alone produced five announcements, starting on Monday, when Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced its StorEdge 5310 Compliance Archiving System based on its NAS system (see Sun Ships Archive System). Suns system uses iLumin Software Services Inc.’s software to archive, manage, and retrieve email to meet compliance regulations (see iLumin Helps Sun Comply).

Today, four announcements were made in New York City at the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference:

• Intradyn Inc.
  revealed it is offering tape encryption for its ComplianceVault email appliance and the next version of its RocketVault backup appliance (see Intradyn Intros Tape Encryption).
• Email archiving software vendor C2C Systems
  and file archiving vendor BridgeHead Software Ltd.
  are offering an integrated package for email and file archiving (see C2C, Bridgehead Partner).
• LiveOffice Corp. launched Global Power Search (GPS) technology to reduce the time required to search archived email.
• Fortiva Inc. upgraded its Fortiva Archiving & Compliance Suite, adding support for Instant Messaging, better integration with Microsoft Active Directory, and reports designed specifically for financial services.

What makes email archiving so hot? Research points to compliance as the major factor driving the market. When The Radicati Group Inc. surveyed users in May on why email archiving is so important, 28 percent listed compliance with government regulations and another 25 percent pointed to internal policy compliance.

Radicati reports that a typical corporate email account receives 19.5 Mbytes of data per day and will average more than 45 Mbytes per day by 2009. In 2002, that number was 5 Mbytes per day. In all, the firm forecasts the email archiving market will grow from $465 million this year to $4.5 billion in 2009.