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EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp. are building up their respective e-mail archiving offerings through development and acquisition to give customers more stringent control of enterprise content.
The goal for each of the companies is to leverage the combined strengths of e-mail archiving, content management and storage management to save customers time and money by enabling more intelligent content searches and more efficient use of storage resources.
EMC in November will introduce an upgrade to its Legato Email Extender archiving software that features new support for Microsoft Corp.s Exchange 2003. Email Extender 4.7 will let companies rapidly archive e-mail messages that are associated with personal folders, called .pst files, in Microsofts Outlook e-mail client, EMC officials said.
The .pst files are often difficult to back up because they are spread across numerous notebooks and desktops throughout an enterprise. In addition, when files get too large, the data can become inaccessible. New functionality in Email Extender 4.7 will help migrate .pst files more quickly, as well as support mobile users by providing access in a detached mode, said officials in Hopkinton, Mass.
EMCs next e-mail-handling enhancement is planned for next year, when the company will add capabilities for searching e-mail archives to its Documentum content repository. The move will allow users to search for a specific e-mail from a range of users and across a variety of document types using Documentum tools.
Veritas, which added e-mail archiving to its lineup in March with the introduction of Data Lifecycle Manager, is boosting its e-mail archiving technologies through the $225 million acquisition last week of KVault Software Ltd. Veritas officials said the company will absorb KVS archiving products into Veritas backup and storage management technologies in the coming year.
KVS software helps customers manage content growth in corporate e-mail environments by archiving and indexing data stored within platforms such as Exchange.
Although Veritas officials did not provide details on the integration plans, some industry observers said KVS technologies would help the Mountain View, Calif., company fill a gaping hole in its offerings, namely content management.
“KVS current product set and underlying technology point to KVS becoming more of a full-blown content management suite rather than e-mail archiving,” said Peter Gerr, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, in Milford, Mass. “There is potential for Veritas to move into that direction.”
David Taylor, who already uses both KVS and Veritas technologies, said he is pleased to see the two software lines moving closer.
“Thousands of our servers are protected with [Veritas] Backup Exec. [The KVS acquisition is] really a good thing for us because now it puts all of our archiving under one vendor,” said Taylor, CIO of the Florida Department of Health, in Tallahassee.
Since the state of Florida allows public access to all public records, including e-mail messages, Taylor said e-mail archiving has been a major lifesaver in satisfying backup and recovery demands.
“Ive had three massive public-records requests this week alone—it keeps us hopping,” Taylor said. “I used to have full-time staff doing backup and recovery, and now its all from a console.”
One major issue Veritas and many of its KVS customers will face when the acquisition closes next month is that a quarter of KVS business comes from EMCs Centera customers. Neither EMC nor Veritas officials would say how the two companies would handle that situation.
“Our expectation is that relationship will change,” said Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations at Veritas.