Compliance fuels boom in email archiving

Global sales of email archiving applications rose 45 per cent in 2006, fuelled by the need to satisfy compliance, legal discovery and storage optimisation requirements.

IDC expects the market to approach $1.4bn in 2011 at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.4 per cent.

"The hosted service delivery segment of the market posted surprisingly strong growth in 2006," said Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for compliance infrastructure at IDC.

"This was fuelled in part by financial services customers looking to transition old SEC/NASD compliant archiving solutions into more robust message archiving platform architectures.

"Customers are demanding integrated workflows that support legal discovery and audit requirements.

"In addition, the aggressive reduction in the cost of connectivity and storage has been combined with rising awareness of the new legal regime to underpin the green-field opportunities in the non-SEC compliant SMB and mid-market segments."

Laura DuBois, research director for storage software at IDC, predicts that email and other content archiving offerings will converge over the next five years as firms focus on better information management.

"Email archiving is increasingly fuelled by business and IT requirements for electronic discovery and regulatory compliance as well as performance, capacity and storage optimisation," she said.

IDC's report noted that Symantec/KVS led the market in 2006 based on revenues, followed by Zantaz.

The study expects that, while the Americas will continue to account for the bulk of the spending, revenue contribution from EMEA and Asia/Pacific will rise over the forecast period.

IDC Report: Worldwide Email Archiving Applications 2007-2011 Forecast and 2006 Vendor Shares: Storage Optimization, Mailbox Management, and Records Retention for eDiscovery and Compliance Drive Investments