IDC Reports Archiving Trends

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- The worldwide email archiving applications market grew 45% in 2006 driven by the need for email archiving to satisfy compliance, legal discovery, and storage optimization requirements. IDC expects the market to approach $1.4 billion in 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.4%.

"The hosted service delivery segment of the market posted surprisingly strong growth in 2006, fueled in part by financial services customers looking to transition their old SEC/NASD compliant archiving solutions into more robust message archiving platform architectures," said Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for Compliance Infrastructure at IDC. "Customers are demanding integrated workflows that support legal discovery and audit requirements. In addition, the aggressive reduction in the cost of connectivity and storage combined with rising awareness of the new legal regime to underpin the green-field opportunities in the non-SEC compliant SMB and mid-market segments."

"Email archiving is increasingly fueled by both business and IT requirements for electronic discovery and regulatory compliance as well as performance, capacity, and storage optimization," said Laura DuBois, research director for Storage Software at IDC. "We expect over the next five years to see email and other content archiving solutions converge as firms continue to focus on managing information versus infrastructure."

IDC