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Message archiving

If you were to stand at the intersection of "electronic communication" and "corporate compliance" you would see a large uncovered manhole - the black hole of "message retention." Most corporations' ability to sort, retain, locate and mine messages hasn't caught up with regulatory requirements and business demands.

But that's changing. Message archiving systems are going to be the next big thing in e-mail and instant messaging, if you believe word on the street. True, tools that catalog e-mails have been around for a while - mostly used for e-mail management and archiving to lower-cost media, and occasionally to mine content for knowledge management. However, corporations will adopt more advanced electronic communication archiving and indexing tools en masse, and soon.

"The worldwide message archiving market will grow from $197 million in 2003, peaking in 2006 at $994 million, with a CAGR of 38%. There will then be a decline in revenues in 2007 to $917 million, continuing down to $660 million in 2008," says Erica Rugullies, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Demand will grow . . . based on new regulations, more companies facing legal discovery issues and growing mailbox environment costs," she says.

Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and other government initiatives, corporations might be forced to locate messages by content and then hand them over for legal discovery. While most companies back up their e-mail stores, few index them at the same time. Fewer still have any system in place to back up IMs or to prevent users from deleting e-mails from personal in-boxes. Most e-mail management systems automatically delete messages by date, without concern to content.

A $2.7 million judgment against Philip Morris U.S.A. for deleting e-mail is being looked on by the messaging industry as a test case for e-mail retention liability. The judgment, issued in July by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, fined Philip Morris for deleting e-mail more than two months old, according to court documents. In 1999, the court ordered Philip Morris to preserve "all documents and other records" that might contain information about a government case pending against the company, the motion said. In 2002, the routine deletions were discovered. While Philip Morris has protested the ruling, the message is clear - if a company is told to turn over messages pertaining to a specific topic, it had better be able to locate all of them.