Archiving101.com

Last month Zantaz was acquired by Autonomy for $375M USD which brought a whole new twist on the archiving market. Historically mostly the storage vendors wanted to be players in this market.  The whole story of this acquisition is told by Venture Beat.

 Despite the nice sounding $375-million price, Venture Beat reports that “terminally ill founder, William Bankert, will end up with only $650,000 or so from the sale.”  The Venture Beat report has details of what it describes as the “company’s board of directors, including ComVentures partner Roland van der Meer, of rigging a fifth round of funding in 2002 to dilute common stockholders.”

This article is one of the many that you can find on the web. It kind of describes more in detail the current need for these solutions. Originally email archiving systems were created because disk space was at a premium (9GB SCSI hard disks for your Exchange Server were top of the line)… these days it is the sheer volume of information.I don’t necessarily agree with the financial numbers though of the industry. Radicati’s numbers are always highly bloated. My estimate is that the worldwide email archiving revenue for 2006 was under 750M USD (which is on the high side of my estimates). Estimates are that market leader Symantec was responsible for about 140M of that number.�

When I was a Product Manager, I was once in a team meeting where another Product Manager was complaining that it was so difficult

to keep track of what his competitors where up to.  After all, you want to keep track of trends, sales strategies and those kinda things.  When I asked him to elaborate more on this I found it actually somewhat amusing that he only had a handful of competitors to keep track off (less then 4).  Almost any customer sees the need for an archiving like product in his company and analysts have spoken out loud many times that this will eventually be a multi-billion dollar industry. Hereis an example is Radicati, however their finanical forecasts of the archiving industry always need to be taken with a grain of salt. This of course creates the equivalent of the Klondike Gold Rush as all vendors want a share of this pie.  This also explains the acquisition train that has been going on in this space which I first talked about in my first post .  So the archiving space is very crowded and to give you an idea of who all are in this space, let me provide you a short list of those companies that I am currently aware of (in no particular order):

Microsoft (formerly FrontBridge)

EMC (formerly Legato/OTG)

IBM

HP (formerly Persist)

Symantec (formerly VERITAS/KVS)

Quest Software (formerly Aftermail)

Mimosa Systems

ZL Technologies (formerly known as ZipLip)

CommVault

MessageOne

Mirapoint

Barracuda

Postini (now Google)

AXS One

Waterford Technologies

Overtone Software

Fortiva

GFI

OpenText (formerly IXOS)

AdvisorMail

IronMountain

Sherpa Software

Autonomy (formerly Zantaz)

CA (formerly iLumin)

RenewData

Exchange@PAM

Exclaimer

MailArchiva

Global Relay

MessageSolution

Athena Archiver

NAXiAN

Symprech

Information Management Research

C2C Systems

Advantec

Arcmail Tech

Lighthouse Global Technology

Inboxer

Now .. I most likely missed one or two here on this list, and if so .. let me know.  However can you imagine being a customer who is shopping for a solution ?   How can this customer go through all the marketing FUD that is out there and find the true solution that would fit his needs? 

And for that one PM … I kinda showed him a similar list like this on my own presentation and he stopped complaining fairly quickly.

This is an interesting topic. The succes of a proper archiving system relies on how good its search and index technology is.
Like the archiving space the search space has seen many recent acquisitions and keeping up with this industry is a challenge.  I’ve been particularly impressed with the writers at new Idea Engineering who have a regular publication on Enterprise Search which I can highly recommend to people. Last months article discussed filter technology which is used in search engines to read specific file formats.

In order for an index to be created , a search engine will need to read the content of every document it sees.  This content is then cataloged into a compressed/optimized index.  When a search query is executed against this index, items that match this query will be shown.  However, here is the challenge.  In order to create this index the engine must be able to read all the documents which come in all different types like Office documents, zip files, PDFs, HTML and the list goes on.   The search engine can only be efficient if there is a good document filter available to read all the different formats and convert it into text that the search engine can then index.   If the search engine is unable to call a filter that can read a specific content type, the content of the document can’t be scanned and in result searches on the content of this document will fail it show up. 

The big three vendors that provide the so called filter technology remain the same … Stellent (now part of Oracle), KeyView (Autonomy) and the Microsoft iFilter framework.

The whole article can be found here.

This is the first post on archiving101.com.  I’ve pondered quite a long time to create a blog about an industry that has been hyped up so much over the recent years.  While there are many blogs or websites that focus on related technologies, none actually touch the core of archiving software.  My goal is to write no-nonsense about archiving products and its related technologies, write on futures that I’m expecting to happen and related technologies. I’ve worked for many years now in the archiving industry and have seen many companies come and go and many ideas come and go.  The email archiving industry started to raise its head in the mid to late 90s with companies like OTG, iLumin, EAS, KVS and IXOS.  Many of these names might no longer sound familiar as all of them have gone through one or more then one acquisition.  OTG (known for its EmailXtender product) was acquired by Legato in 2002 for 403M USD, while Legato was acquired by EMC not much later.  Similar fates happened to iLumin (now CA), EAS, (acquired by Zantaz and in recently by Autonomy), KVS (later VERITAS, then Symantec) and IXOS who was picked up by OpenText.  All in all an industry that has seen a lot of activity and seeing the market predictions that the analysts are providing hasn’t seen the last of this.  Over the next few weeks I’ll go deeper in on the history of archiving systems.