E-mail active archiving products continue to add functionality to meet new market demands. In this Gartner report, read about the solutions available to meet basic and complex requirements at a corresponding range in cost.
Gartner’s 2007 e-mail active-archiving Magic Quadrant is focused on enterprise-class products that met the criteria defined below and were able to prove, through strong references, their ability to address the need of a market looking to support hundreds and thousands of users. Organizations with limited requirements or a modest number of users may want to start with one of these products, knowing that they will eventually need the scalability and functionality they provide. Products that are not included in this research may be 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, they have strengthened their understanding of market requirements and have responded with new features and a more robust implementation of existing features. Most vendors have stable code 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 and expanded device support. Several are providing links to other content archiving or records management solutions. A few vendors still focus on the unique compliance supervision requirements of the financial community, but that market is relatively small compared to the market for support for legal discovery support and mailbox management. The December 2006 changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is motivating more companies to move more quickly from the evaluation stage to implementation mode. Although many vendors have made significant improvements to their products, there are still many areas of concern, not the least of which is the complexity of deploying and managing growing archives. Clients continue to ask for better archive management and monitoring tools, even though vendors have made progress in this area this past year. Migrating personal stores into the archive continues to be a pain point in the quality of the available tools and in the time it takes to accomplish the archiving. As the archives grow, the indexes generated for the content also grow. The time to create those indexes for clients receiving large volumes of messages 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 features often serving as quality assurance departments for their vendors. Improved support was a focus for most vendors this year with marked improvement noted by customers. Training of partners and local installation support staff is still a weak area, but low scores for support were most often tied to code problems. The biggest roadblock for customers is in defining their own requirements. Waiting for legal and the business units to agree on a corporate messaging policy and defining detailed retention rules often delays the selection and implementation process. An effective e-mail management policy is essential for organizations in today’s litigious environment. However, companies need to begin archiving now to gain the operational benefits and to centralize data so that when the policy is finalized and the retention rules are defined, the implementation can be adjusted to quickly respond. By 2010, 50% of the archiving implementations will use the archive created for compliance and/or discovery to improve e-mail management through message stubbing (0.7 probability). Do not compare the placement of vendors from last year to this year. The market has changed, and the criteria for selecting and ranking vendors continue to evolve. Vendors that did not adapt will naturally move to the left on Completeness of Vision. Vendors that have not yet delivered proven solutions to the new market requirements measured per the defined criteria for this year’s Magic Quadrant may also have moved to the left on Completeness of Vision. This does not imply that the products evaluated last year are now deficient. It just means that new requirements have provided new challenges that the vendor has yet to meet.
