The basics of selecting an E-mail Archiving and Management system

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 07:51:00 -0400

In our most recent report, E-mail Archiving & Management (EAM), we struggled early on in the research process to differentiate in a meaningful way among the vendors in this sector. It was a good struggle to have, as it turned out that through our research we found few buyers or even other analyst sources had tried to categorize this sector either.

Like all markets, EAM can be sliced and diced in various ways, but as a starting point to buyers I tend to suggest first subdividing the vendors between those that are Policy-centric and those that are Archiving-centric. And of course figure out which particular category has more appeal and fit for your particular organization.

The Policy-centric vendors we evaluate in the report are those that offer the most advanced and sophisticated functions to provide records management-style capabilities to e-mail. Most typically these vendors sell into larger enterprises and government departments. As such you'll find them at the higher end in terms of cost and complexity to deploy, configure, and run. This higher cost and complexity is justified for customers in heavily regulated environments or any enterprise that needs to closely monitor e-mail content. It is also justified for those trying to filter out non-business related mails, archiving only true records. Vendors we consider to be in this category include CA, Open Text, and Symantec.

Archiving-centric vendors, just like their policy-centric competitors, sell mainly into larger enterprise or government markets. Though most of them provide some kind of policy management capabilities, their real appeal lies in their approach to archive optimization. These vendors tend to market more to the IT buyer than the business buyer, as their approach centers on backing up and actively archiving mail servers to maximize server and storage optimization.

In some cases vendors accomplish this through novel and unique hardware and storage arrangements (Mimosa, ZL, and HP); others approach it through a deep and long understanding of broad archiving requirements (AXS-One and EMC).

Of all the technologies we evaluate EAM is arguably the most difficult for a buyer to compare options side by side. But sometimes just some simple slicing and dicing can help the process.

Announcing the E-mail Archiving and Management Report

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:29:00 -0400

This may well go down as the busiest period in CMS Watch's history as this month we launch yet another new technology evaluation report, The E-mail Archiving & Management Report 2008. From our release:

EAM technology has become critical to both commercial and government enterprises -- but for a variety of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. This has led to a similarly diverse set of approaches from EAM suppliers...

It's somewhat surprising that this report -- which provides comprehensive comparative evaluations of 14 leading EAM vendors -- is one of the first of its kind anywhere.

Subscribers, you will be getting your copy very shortly. Others can order a copy or download a free sample here.

The report loosely groups EAM vendors into three categories:

Policy-Centric: Autonomy, CA, Open Text, IBM, and Symantec

Archive-Centric: AXS-One, EMC, HP, Mimosa, and ZL Technologies

SaaS: Dell, Fortiva, Google, and Microsoft

The research has taken more than six months to complete, and in the process we have talked to many customers and users of EAM systems. The conversations were illuminating and we look forward very much to continue those discussions moving forward.

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The basics of selecting an E-mail Archiving and Management system

Announcing the E-mail Archiving and Management Report