Why You Need Email Active Archiving Now

Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving, 2007
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00148154, Carolyn DiCenzo, Kenneth Chin, 16 May 2007, RA1 05212008
E-mail active archiving products continue to add functionality tomeet new market demands. Solutions are available to meet basicand complex requirements at a corresponding range in cost.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOWGartner's 2007 e-mail active-archiving Magic Quadrant is focused on enterprise-classproducts that met the criteria defined below and were able to prove, through strongreferences, their ability to address the need of a market looking to support hundreds andthousands of users. Organizations with limited requirements or a modest number of usersmay want to start with one of these products, knowing that they will eventually need thescalability and functionality they provide. Products that are not included in this research maybe too new to the market or may provide a tactical solution to an immediate problem.
As the vendors covered in this year's Magic Quadrant have gained more customers, theyhave strengthened their understanding of market requirements and have responded with newfeatures and a more robust implementation of existing features. Most vendors have stablecode for basic features to allow for full capture of all messages and for mailbox management.They are looking to differentiate themselves with better discovery, administrative tools andexpanded device support. Several are providing links to other content archiving or recordsmanagement solutions. A few vendors still focus on the unique compliance supervisionrequirements of the financial community, but that market is relatively small compared to themarket for support for legal discovery support and mailbox management. The December2006 changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is motivating more companies to movemore quickly from the evaluation stage to implementation mode.
Although many vendors have made significant improvements to their products, there are stillmany areas of concern, not the least of which is the complexity of deploying and managinggrowing archives. Clients continue to ask for better archive management and monitoringtools, even though vendors have made progress in this area this past year. Migrating personalstores into the archive continues to be a pain point in the quality of the available tools and inthe time it takes to accomplish the archiving. As the archives grow, the indexes generated forthe content also grow. The time to create those indexes for clients receiving large volumes ofmessages on a daily basis, plus the time to search them, continues to be a key concern.Code quality for new features continues to be a concern with early adopters of such featuresoften serving as quality assurance departments for their vendors. Improved support was afocus for most vendors this year with marked improvement noted by customers. Training ofpartners and local installation support staff is still a weak area, but low scores for supportwere most often tied to code problems.2 The biggest roadblock for customers is in defining Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving, 2007their own requirements. Waiting for legal and thebusiness units to agree on a corporate messagingpolicy and defining detailed retention rules often challengers leadersdelays the selection and implementation process. Aneffective e-mail management policy is essential fororganizations in today's litigious environment.However, companies need to begin archiving now togain the operational benefits and to centralize dataso that when the policy is finalized and the retention Symantecrules are defined, the implementation can beadjusted to quickly respond. etuceSTRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S) xeBy 2010, 50% of the archiving implementations will EMC ouse the archive created for compliance and/or t ydiscovery to improve e-mail management through Zantaztimessage stubbing (0.7 probability). ZL Technologiesl IBMiba
MAGIC QUADRANT HP Quest SoftwareDo not compare the placement of vendors from lastyear to this year. The market has changed, and the Open Text Mimosa Systemscriteria for selecting and ranking vendors continue to CA AXS-Oneevolve. Vendors that did not adapt will naturally move C2C Systemsto the left on Completeness of Vision. Vendors that Messaging Architectshave not yet delivered proven solutions to the new CommVault Waterford Technologiesmarket requirements measured per the definedcri... [download for more]