SunGard launched a
Storage as a Service (SaaS) offering for email management
today, while the largest backup vendors remain in the SaaS talking
stage.
SunGard is rebranding its new
email archiving service from MessageOne, which also partners
with Iron Mountain Inc. for outsourced email services. SunGard is
offering a three-level service: the basic level provides email
backups and email failover, an intermediate level adds archiving
and the third and highest level offers more advanced features and
longer retention periods for e-discovery and compliance archiving.
The highest level also includes search and indexing through FAST,
as well as an Outlook plug-in that lets end users directly access
the archive.
In the event of a disaster or outage, end users can access the
secondary email server and archive hosted at SunGard's facilities,
as well as a store of recently sent and received messages. Access
is possible from any Web-connected device, including smart phones
and PDAs. Microsoft's Exchange also supports a Web utility,
webmail, for remote access, but it's connected to the primary
Exchange server. At most companies, if Exchange is down, Webmail is
down as well.
"Everyone worries about backups and replication, and data center
availability, but they forget to plan for how people are going to
access their data, their applications and other forms of
communication in the event of a major disruption," said Stephanie
Balaouras, senior analyst with Forrester Research.
SunGard's Managed E-Mail Archiving is generally available today.
Pricing is based on storage capacity, as well as retention period,
averaging out to around $10 per mailbox. It supports email backup
and Web access for Exchange and Lotus Notes, but a recent "dramatic
rewrite" of Lotus Notes means archiving support for Notes email is
still a ways off, according to Don Norbeck, director of product
development for SunGard availability services.
SaaS is a common theme among storage software vendors, although
it's hard to pin some of them down on when they will have
commercially available services. Small and medium-sized business
(SMB) backup software vendor Yosemite Technologies Inc. plans to
keep up with the SaaS craze by launching a hybrid SaaS version of
its new FileKeeper Pro application that launched this week.
Yosemite CEO George Symons said the service will be available
sometime in the next six months.
"Customers also want to be able to keep a local copy of their
data, so we wouldn't be managing all of their backups, but our next
release of the software will extend a hybrid approach, where users
will keep a local copy and send data to us remotely for an offsite,
secondary backup," Symons said.
Balouras said that workstation and laptop backup, such as that
offered by FileKeeper Pro, is an underserved corner of the SaaS
market, as well as the data protection market in general.
"Companies didn't always see the data on end-user clients as
critical," she said. "They focused most of their energies on file
server, application and database backup."
FileKeeper Pro is the result of Yosemite's acquisition of
FileKeeper in February. File Keeper Pro differs from Yosemite's
corporate edition by leaving out centralized management and
reporting capabilities, such as the ability to see what files have
been lost after an outage. The software will be available for
$29.99 for a perpetual license for download from the Yosemite Web
site. Yosemite also intends to sell it in retail stores through
partner Smith Micro Software Inc., but no retail partners have been
announced.
IBM's continuous data protection (CDP) for Files is FileKeeper's
main competitor, coming in with a slightly higher price tag at $35
per download. IBM also landed some of the biggest retail partners
for the software over a year ago, including OfficeMax, Staples and
Circuit Stores.
EMC, Symantec: SaaS plans still murky
Despite announcements in the spring from EMC Corp. and Symantec
Corp. that they'd also be taking the SaaS plunge this year, it
remains unclear when those services will see the light of day.
"At this time, EMC is looking at online backup and recovery as a
great market opportunity, and you'll see EMC get into this market
in the Q4 timeframe," said EMC's director of public relations,
Michael Gallant.
EMC is still stonewalling inquiries as to its rumored
acquisition last week of backup and recovery SaaS startup Berkeley
Data Systems, owners of the Mozy and MozyPro services.
Symantec isn't much more specific about the details of its
Symantec Protection Network Saas platform. Symantec director of
product management Chris Schin said the vendor's backup and
recovery SaaS is in beta tests right now, and general availability
is expected "in the next couple of months." Like EMC, Symantec
isn't willing to be any more specific on timing, or what the
service will eventually look like.
According to Balaouras, these companies are probably finding
that converting their software into SaaS is easier said than done.
"SaaS offerings have to support multitenancy and have features
built in for the vendor, such as billing," Balaouras said. "You
can't just take an existing application and turn into a SaaS
offering easily."