It used to be, back in the olden days of e-mail management, that if you ran good anti-virus defenses and maintained e-mail servers properly you were pretty much ahead of the game in terms of good management of your e-mail infrastructure. Then along came the deluge of spam; the need to focus more on encrypting messages; the need to scan outbound messages for confidential and other sensitive information; and the need to implement sound disaster recovery, as well as to keep on top of spyware. Then there's the need for regulatory oversight, managing the increased use of consumer instant messaging in the workplace and the threat of IM-oriented malware. The result is that messaging administrators face a lot of different problems that need to be solved properly in order to keep messaging running 24/7.

While best-of-breed solutions work very nicely to address these problems, a collection of eight or 10 different vendors' systems can be difficult to manage given the potential for unexpected interactions between them, different upgrade cycles, etc. As a result, our research finds that the vast majority of people who manage e-mail systems want an integrated messaging management system that will allow them to have a single view into all of the functions they need to manage messaging properly.

Vendors are responding to this market demand by offering new capabilities in their products, acquiring companies that offer point solutions that can be integrated with other complementary systems, or both. The market's need for integrated messaging management is the key driver for all messaging acquisitions we've been seeing in the past year or so, including those by Symantec, Microsoft, Computer Associates and many other companies. And, it's the driver that will keep these acquisitions coming at a regular pace throughout the next 12 to 18 months.

In short, many vendors are becoming "one-stop shops" of messaging management functionality, a trend that will continue unabated for the foreseeable future. I'd appreciate getting your feedback on the usefulness of these one-stop shop approaches vs. selecting best-of-breed capabilities: please drop me a line at michael@ostermanresearch.com.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.