E-Mail Management Comes of Age

Just when knowledge workers thought IT might be getting a handle on managing burgeoning e-mail, instant messaging IM- and other content, the goal line keeps moving. There is not only an ever-expanding amount of content, but also it is coming from a greater variety of sources, and new requirements for capture and classification of live content are arising from regulation, litigation and governance demands.

?There?s an explosion of content from blogs, wikis, Web meetings, voice over IP, collaboration systems, e-mail and IM, and it?s causing chaos in the enterprise,? says T.M. Ravi, president and CEO of Mimosa Systems. ?The bigger problem is not simply storage, but that this content is fragmented in various repositories, causing higher storage and access costs. Then you have increased security, legal and compliance issues on top of it all.? E-mail management EMM- has rapidly evolved from simple archiving of IMs, e-mails and attachments to a compliance and records solution that lies at the nexus of e-mail archiving, enterprise content management, electronic records management and e-discovery. Those demands have IT managers running into the arms of new technology content management firms like Mimosa, which provides a suite for capture and archiving of live content. Mimosa has experienced rapid growth?to 130-plus employees since shipping its first software license less than two years ago. The company has added nearly 100 new customers in the past year and counts a 56,000-seat installation at Affiliated Computer Services ACS-, as well as Sears and AAA as major customers. Vendors competing in the EMM marketplace offer both hosted and in-house alternatives. Some of the larger and more active players range from A to Z and include AXS-One, Zantaz, ZipLip and ZyLAB, as well as Fortiva, MessageSolution, Postini and Sherpa Software. ECM vendors like Open Text, Hyland and Stellent recently acquired by Oracle-, IBM and Optical Image Technology have offerings too. But the established leaders in this marketplace are certainly Symantec and EMC, both of which have strong roots in e-mail archiving and storage management. According to Art Gilliand, senior director of product marketing at Symantec, its Enterprise Vault product obtained in the Veritas acquisition, and previously from U.K.-based KVS- has over 4,500 customers and manages more than 8 million e-mail mailboxes. Pressures in the marketplace for the capture of live content have caused Symantec to broaden its product mix with Information Foundation 2007, which connects to Enterprise Vault. EMC, Symantec?s challenger in the EMM marketplace, has about half as many organizations using its E-mailXtender family of products vs. Symantec?s Enterprise Vault, according to Stewart Noyce, senior manager of product marketing at EMC. Noyce has noted some key trends over the past year. ?Initially, organizations looked for storage savings and optimization. Increasingly, they are demanding journaling of content, records management and e-discovery capabilities,? he says. Source and full article: www.kmworld.coma>