As Iron Mountain attempts a move from tape archiving to digital
managed services, it has joined a multitude of other companies
hitching their wagons to the star of e-discovery and email
archiving.
The company has partnered with MessageOne to offer its Email
Management Services (EMS) package, which includes archiving,
security and continuity options that can be combined into one
service or broken out separately for users. MessageOne claims that
more than 1 million mailboxes are already archived using its
storgae products. Iron Mountain had previously offered a service,
Digital Archives, which focused on Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) compliance for financial institutions.
The Exchange-only Email Management Suite will run on a Windows 2000
server in the customer's environment and talks directly to the
Exchange host to extract messages, performs antivirus and antispam
functions, and replicates system-state information for failover,
depending on which services the customer has selected.
Iron Mountain will be offering the services as either a
three-in-one package or as individual services, priced on a per
mailbox, per month subscription basis, as well as per gigabyte (GB)
capacity. The entire package, including archiving, security and
continuity services, costs $6 per mailbox; archiving as a
standalone service, $4 per mailbox; continuity, $3 per mailbox; and
security $1.50 per mailbox. On the storage side, after selecting
the per mailbox rate, users have the option of prepaying for
capacity at $4 per gigabyte or a pay-as-you-grow plan that costs $5
per gigabyte.
According to Sean Hegarty, senior product manager for electronic
records in Iron Mountain's digital division, Iron Mountain will be
using MessageOne's software but rebranding the service as Iron
Mountain Email Management Suite. For the time being, the service
will be run through Iron Mountain, but the majority of data will be
stored at MessageOne facilities; Iron Mountain will eventually take
over the hosting of data as well.
An acquisition to follow?
Hegarty did not rule out a possible merger between the two
companies. "No discussions are currently ongoing," he said, "but in
the past you've seen similar examples where we've built a solution
with a company and then acquired it, as we did with Connected
[Corp.] and LiveVault [Corp.]"
If an acquisition comes, Iron Mountain's history indicates it
will probably be some way off -- the company partnered with desktop
backup startup Connected for a little over a year before acquiring
the company for $117 million in 2004 and was happy to partner with
LiveVault for five years before acquiring it for $50 million in
December 2005.
Users have many options -- With the service and in the
market
Doesn't it seem like everyone and their brother has an email
archiving product these days? Yes and no, according to Brian
Babineau, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "There are
many companies offering some component of this package," he said.
"But when you get into the number of companies offering failover,
archiving and security, and offering them as a managed service, the
number is comparatively few."
Still, Iron Mountain has its work cut out for it to grow its
two-year-old digital division past the physical document storage
and tape archiving the company continues to be most recognized for.
Among the issues still facing Iron Mountain as it tries to move
into digital businesses, according to Hegarty, will be integration
between its products. He said Iron Mountain is currently looking to
find ways to integrate its previous email compliance service with
the new Email Management Suite, as well as integrating PC backup,
server backup and archiving services into one platform.
As of this announcement, Hegarty said, Iron Mountain is also
opening new data centers in Europe to try to further broaden the
appeal of its digital services. "Customers do have a lot of options
in this market," Babineau said. "[Iron Mountain] is going to have
to be able to offer a little bit better mousetrap."