Veritas Software has purchased KVault Software (KVS) for
$225m to move into the e-mail archiving market.
Meanwhile, KVS' biggest customer and Veritas' main competitor,
EMC, has already started to offering an e-mail archiving service
through partner Equant.
KVS has more than 900 customers and 1.7 million users, and
Gartner lists it as a leader in its e-mail archiving Magic Quadrant
2. Gartner has also predicted that e-mail archiving seats will grow
at a 57% compound growth rate through to 2007.
The e-mail archive market is rapidly becoming the battleground
for an entire industry, thanks largely to the rise in compliance
regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Archiving e-mails and other messages is very different from
ordinary data backup not least because of the need to handle
attachments and the existence of e-mail threads of messages and
replies and distribution lists.
As such, any company claiming to offer a complete storage set of
products has to have e-mail archiving capability. However, while
EMC has it already with Legato EmailXtender and also as a product
set with Legato Systems and Windows Server 2003.
Last March, Veritas announced Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0
software to "help organisations meet global regulatory requirements
for data management - from creation to deletion - across all
storage media".
It involved partnerships for different media types, such as
e-mail. But e-mail is becoming so central that partnering is not
enough and Veritas has gone out and bought what it sees as the
best.
The KVS Enterprise Vault software provides policy-based
archiving of e-mails and attachments and files held in Microsoft
Exchange, SharePoint, Office and Windows file systems. The indexing
facilities simplify retrieval.
Chairman, president and chief executive officer, Gary Bloom,
said, "KVS will add another strategic component to the Veritas
utility computing portfolio. [By buying KVS] we can deliver
customers the market-leading software for storing, managing,
backing up and archiving all their information."
Enterprise Vault will replace Data LifeCycle Manager during 2005
and be called Veritas Enterprise Vault. Such a hurried move, less
than six months after Data Lifecycle Manager was announced,
suggests that the product has been less than successful.
Product life is generally longer than half a year, admitted
Veritas' corporate marketing director for EMEA, Tony Occleshaw,
"We underestimated the sense of urgency around compliance with
customers due to all the regulations," he said.
EMC's partner Equant, a France Telecom subsidiary, is teaming
with Kahn Consulting to offer a fully-managed e-mail archiving
service across remote links. EMC Legato's EmailXtender and
EmailXaminer products are being used in the service.
This is an ASP model with hosting centers in Atlanta, London,
Rennes and Sydney. Customers can choose to host their central
archive on their own premises.
"Enterprises have seen 20% to 30% savings in customer trials of
this service," said Andy Early, sales and marketing director at
Equant.
A version of the service for smaller businesses will be rolled
out in 2005 - demonstrating how far ahead EMC is compared to
Veritas.
At the same time, there has been another acquisition in the
e-mail archiving field with FrontBridge Technologies buying
MessageRite.
This company's managed e-mail and instant messaging service
store messages in its datacentre. Existing FrontBridge services
scan e-mail for spam or virus content and they will be combined
with the archive service.
As well as this, online backup and recovery provider Amerivault
and e-mail archiving specialist Connected announced this week an
outsourced e-mail archiving service to help users prepare for
compliance regulations.
Amerivault E-mail Archiving Service combines Amerivault's backup
and recovery systems with Connected's ArchiveStore/EM e-mail
archiving tool to provide management of a business's e-mails off
site.
Chris Mellor writes for Techworld.com