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 .)On the product front, Logicalis rolled out an email archiving package consisting of EMC's Centera content addressable storage (CAS) box, EMC EmailExtender Email Xaminer, and DiskXtender email management and archiving software.

The fuss over email is hardly surprising to savvy IT and storage administrators. Mohamad Alkazaz, IT manager at Newbury, Ohio-based Saint Gobain Crystals, surveyed his internal users last year about their computing habits and preferences. “We asked them, ‘What do you consider your most important application? Every morning you come in and power up your computer and want to access something, what would that thing be?’” he says.

Alkazaz says 80 percent of the 400 users who responded said email was that application. And they wanted to have their emails always available on their own PCs.

“They need access to the email stored locally on their hard drives,” he says. “We know some people keep archives of their email year after year, so imagine the amount of data being stored on these computers -- and we have to make sure that it’s all backed up.”

Joe Furmanski, technology architect at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) says he’s looking at implementing email archiving software -- probably IBM CommonStore or Symantec Enterprise Vault –-- this year. Furmanski says he can archive email just fine on tape; rapid retrieval is the problem.“Today we leave it up to the users to archive, but we do a full backup every week and keep it on tape,” he says. “We’re hoping to move to an archiving tool. Backing it up is no problem, getting the data back and using it when you need it is the big thing.”

Which means get ready for more surveys highlighting growth of email archiving revenue and features because there’s still a long way to go.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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