* MessageOne’s managed archiving service
Editor’s Note: Starting Dec. 5, this newsletter will be renamed Unified Communications. The name change will reflect the newsletter’s broader focus as we report on the industry’s move toward a unified messaging model. We hope you will continue to enjoy the newsletter and thank you for reading.
I had an interesting discussion with MessageOne recently in which we talked about one of its customers that decided to use MessageOne’s managed archiving service.
Its customer, a major U.S. company in the life sciences industry, has in excess of 30,000 users, but there are more than 100,000 users of the archiving service. The company faced the daunting task of managing a very large number of searches of their e-mail stores in support of legal discovery requirements, including placing legal holds on e-mail because of discovery considerations.
Although the company had an existing, on-premise e-mail archiving system, it found that searches across a growing store of e-mail was difficult and the system was expensive to manage. Further, the company found that it was not able to produce e-mail as it needed to, and that e-mail outage recovery time could extend to one week or more.
The company decided to implement MessageOne’s Email Management Services: EMS Email Archive system to address the problems it faced. The initial benefit was that the system was implemented in 30 days, significantly faster than the company felt it could implement an on-premise archiving solution. Further, the managed service cost was 45.5% of the cost of the on-premise archiving solution it had considered, resulting in substantial cost savings.
This case study points out an interesting fact that companies need to consider about managed services: although managed services are often thought of as providing significant savings primarily for companies in the small to midsized business market, there can be major savings for very large companies, as well.
It’s also important to note that managed services won’t always be cheaper than on-premise solutions – the opposite can certainly be true depending on a variety of factors, including the number of users, the number of facilities that will have to be served, the existing infrastructure, the desired functionality of the new system being considered, etc.




