HP Xtends email offering
Vendor to resell email archiving solution by Legato Systems
Hewlett Packard (HP) unveiled a new relationship with Legato Systems last week that will see the vendor giant reselling the smaller firm's email archiving solution.
According to HP officials, the company intends to integrate HP Services, its StorageWorks storage systems and Legato's EmailXtender as part of a complete bundle targeted at routing, storing, managing, and retrieving email.
The move could help its customers to meet new regulatory requirements and corporate accountability demands.
Nick van Wyk, area vice-president for northern Europe at Legato, said the whole area of compliance and corporate governance has created a great opportunity.
He said: "This is a milestone for both firms, to be able to work together to hit the email archiving market."
Van Wyk added that compliance and email archiving issues are at the forefront of the minds of financial directors and chief executives.
Frank Salmon, managing director of CMS, an HP and Legato distributor, said Legato's email offering was quite new, and that the firm was looking for incremental business following heightened awareness of compliance issues.
"It's not unusual for HP to take a smaller vendor's solution and add it to its own, but this is a positive move. It has a big captive market and an HP endorsement is a stamp of approval for Legato," he said.
Legato's EmailXtender family supports Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, Lotus Notes/Domino, Bloomberg Mail and Unix Sendmail, as well as instant messaging.
Legato executives claimed its EmailXtender 4.4 is the only offering that can speed up the retrieval process of emails and instant messages by archiving both in a single repository.
The Legato offering automates email archiving, and it will be integrated tightly with HP's hard disk arrays, tape libraries and write-once optical storage devices, according to Mark Sorenson, vice-president of HP's Storage Software Division.
"Legato, with the acquisition of OTG, has world-class email archiving capabilities," Sorenson said. "HP is the dominant service provider in the Microsoft Exchange environment.
"Channel partners are looking for new opportunities and this is a good technology for partners."
The move was not unexpected. In a meeting with Computer Reseller News US in May, David Wright, chief executive of Legato, said he expected his firm to become known as a key player in the email space this year.
"One of the things we will probably be known as a year from now is the company you want to come to when it comes to email compliance and management," he said.
"You'll see more and more people endorsing our products. Companies such as HP, IBM, and Iron Mountain will endorse our products."
Salmon said he is surprised more resellers are not getting into the email archiving market. "We made a move into this market and the response was huge. At the moment firms are unsure of what is going on with compliance.
"It's not just the legal aspects; it's about people and processes. It is in every firm's interest to look at this," he said.
Van Wyk added that Legato is hoping to bring the offering to Europe as soon as possible. "Announcements can often take time to get to market. We are determined to get this going as soon as possible - in weeks, not months," he said.
Also last week, HP launched a new low-end NAS appliance at the Microsoft TechEd conference in Dallas.
The StorageWorks NAS1000s appliance will include snapshot, data-replication and volume-expansion capability. It will be aimed at both SMEs and companies with remote offices.
Salmon said there was a huge need for low-end Nas appliances for SMEs.
"There has been progress by lesser-known players, but with its software abilities HP can bring a product to market that has all the bells and whistles at a lower price point," he said.
"The challenge will be price. If the price point is very low it could create limited margin for the channel."
Additional reporting by Joseph Kovar.