This week's highlighted research:



IDC. "Worldwide email archiving applications 2005-2009 forecast and 2004 vendor shares: When you need to know that you've got mail."



The Radicati Group. "E-mail and collaboration corporate survey, 2006-2007."

Forrester Research. "eDiscovery bursts onto the scene."

IDC. "Worldwide compliance infrastructure 2006-2010 forecast: SOX 404 requirements and the emergence of the records and information infrastructure platform define the market." http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=201961

Every few days I go through my emails and delete the ones I don't need, which is most of them. All the ads, spam, notices, messages that I've already read, and the dozen or so notes from some banker in some war-torn country who wants me to help him get his millions out of an American bank--they all are subject to the delete button. I don't archive them, print them, or save them in any way unless it's something I specifically need to remember.

But I'm just a one-man company. Others are subject to regulations, policies and corporate procedures, and email archiving has become a necessary function of the enterprise. And if you're an employee, beware what you say in your emails, those casual little notes aren't as disposable as you think.

IDC's report, "Worldwide email archiving applications 2005-2009" predicts tremendous growth in the email archiving application market, for a number of reasons: Besides regulatory compliance and corporate governance issues that demand increased attention to archiving, growth here will also occur as a result of expanded use of email and email attachments in general. IDC says that basic email archiving will become more common, and more widely available in common messaging and storage applications, although dedicated solutions will continue to be used by some organizations that have more specific needs.

The Radicati Group says that businesses are assigning top priority to fighting spam, and archiving email in 2006. According to their report, email archiving will be a lucrative market in the years to come, with 39 percent of respondents saying that they have plans to deploy email archiving systems in the near future. And not surprisingly, they found that the size of email messages as well as volume are both increasing, a factor that will drive corporate bandwidth and storage requirements up by 61 percent in 2006. An interesting statistic from Radicati: The average corporate email user sends and receives about 16.4Mb of data every day, and this figure will rise to 21.4Mb by 2010.

Forrester gets to the heart of one of the main reasons why some companies are archiving emails, and that is electronic discovery. According to Forrester, it is becoming a common occurrence for companies to suffer large fines because of electronic evidence. Increased litigation is causing companies to be more proactive about how they archive, and how they respond to discovery requests. Electronic discovery represents the other side of email archiving--instead of the saving, this is the finding--and this area is still fragmented. Finally, IDC's other report, "Worldwide compliance infrastructure 2006-2010" notes that the compliance infrastructure market will exceed $21 billion by 2010.

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