Email Growth Spells Etrouble

Email management has been pretty hot for some time now, and it appears to be getting hotter. (See Survey Finds Email Power Shift and Logicalis Archives Email.)

The reasons are obvious. Exchange is increasingly becoming a business-critical application and compliance regulations mandate that emails be retained for years. In some cases decades. Its no wonder the major software vendors have scooped up archiving companies, and a host of smaller companies have offered up inhouse products and managed servers to tame email. (See CA Buys Archiver, No Brainer: Veritas Buys KVS, Email Archives Arrive, and Outsourcers Beef Up Email Archives.)

Still, email management and archiving is far from mature. That’s what the surveys are telling us; and in this case users agree.

IDC forecasts email archiving revenue growing from $310 million last year to $850 million by 2009. IDC also expects more consolidation in the email software market, and organizations will continue to handle email archiving inhouse rather than through services.

Osterman Research released a study commissioned by Mimosa Systems saying most users want to search, access, and recover email -- features Mimosa claims to include in its NearPoint Exchange management application. (See Mimosa Expands Data Management .)