Iron Mountain Archiving Dis-Connected

Iron Mountain Inc. (NYSE: IRM) is pulling the plug on its email archiving product just two months after the company acquired it.

The records-management giant will discontinue its ArchiveStore/EM product next year because of overlap with its existing Digital Archives outsourced service, says company spokesperson Lauren Drapala. ArchiveStore/EM became part of the Iron Mountain portfolio with the acquisition of Connected Corp. in October (see Iron Mountain Gets Connected). Connected itself acquired the product through its purchase of Archive-it (see Connected Gets Into Archive).

Iron Mountain will deliver the final version of the product early next year and cease supporting it altogether by the end of 2005. Links to product information on Connected's Website have already been removed and disabled.

"Maintaining, supporting, marketing, and selling two solutions for one need were not in the best interest of the customers or the business," writes Drapala in an email to Byte and Switch.

Iron Mountain chose to keep its Digital Archives service over Connected's product because it "has a market leadership position, supports more platforms and electronic records types, and has supervision capabilities in line with both the Iron Mountain and Connected visions to provide compliant archiving across digital data types," the spokeswoman adds.