World email archiving market to top £310m
Increase in email volume and attachments lead to surge in demand, analyst claims
The global email archiving market could top $310m for 2005, according to preliminary data from an IDC report.
The market analyst found that a dramatic increase in email volume and email attachments, combined with a stronger focus on regulatory compliance and corporate governance issues, will drive robust revenue growth in the worldwide email archiving application market.
Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for compliance infrastructure at IDC, said: “As email becomes accepted as a record of business, and as more firms adopt record-retention policies that include electronic communications, we expect to see a robust uptake in the deployment of email archiving applications.”
IDC also discovered that the sector will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 34.5 per cent until 2009. The growth will be caused by key trends, such as persistent consolidation in the email archiving application market, and continued preference for insourced rather than outsourced email archiving products in business.
Mark Levitt, research vice-president for collaborative computing at IDC, said: “Basic email archiving will be increasingly available in messaging and storage applications.
“However, many organisations will continue to purchase dedicated solutions that provide a better fit for compliance and corporate governance requirements.”
But, Scott Fletcher, managing director of VAR Associated Network Services, said: “IDC’s 2005 figures show that this is still a low-grade issue, and I doubt resellers will be rushing into the market despite predicted growth.”
Earlier this month a report from storage software vendor BridgeHead Software questioned 165 businesses and discovered that 23 per cent did not archive data, claiming that retrieving a file lost three months ago would be a “hit or miss” affair.