* Lots of activity around growing field of archiving
As I discussed in a recent newsletter, one of the most important needs in messaging is to be able to easily find stuff in a message store, both for personal productivity and for other reasons, such as regulatory compliance, litigation support and storage management. Because there is so much information available to corporate and other users, and because the quantity of this information is growing at more than 30% per year, there is a growing need for technology that can simply archive information and make it available for later use.
The market for archiving is growing and has been evolving rapidly over the past few years, including:
* Continuing acquisitions of archiving companies by larger, more broadly based companies. Among these acquisitions have been EMC’s purchase of Legato and Documentum, FrontBridge’s acquisition of MessageRite, ZANTAZ’s acquisition of Educom, Iron Mountain’s acquisition of Connected and Veritas’ acquisition of KVS. Most of these acquisitions have occurred just this year.
* Increasing numbers of new entrants into the archiving market and new products from existing companies, including Fortiva, Convergence, NorthSeas AMT, MessageGate, ParlaSoft and SECCAS, to name but a few of the many companies in this market.
* Introduction of personal search tools. Google has long been known for its lightning-fast ability to search the Internet. The company recently introduced a free, desktop-based search capability that can index and make available to end users the contents of a hard disk, mailbox and other information stores. Microsoft plans to release a similar desktop capability.
What does this all mean for end users? First, it means that there are a growing number of tools available to help you find the growing array of content stored on your PC, on file servers, on messaging servers, in archives and in other locations. The notion posited so many years ago – that it doesn’t matter where you store stuff as long as you can find it – is coming true.
For e-mail administrators and IT managers, this means you will need to implement archiving systems that make stuff available to a growing constituency: users, who want to be able to find information wherever it may be; the legal department, which will need to be able to find information rapidly to satisfy discovery and other requests; senior members of the management team, who will want to be able to search archives for a wide variety of information; and others who will have specialized information requirements.
Fortunately, there is a growing array of tools designed to help you satisfy these requirements.
