E-Mail archival has taking several twists and turns over the last few years.
The primary one is the use of the archive for legal discovery, sometimes referred to as eDiscovery.
This has left many vendors flat footed and the reasons are in fact quite simple.
Number one, the same product that you, if your a commerical software company,contruct for archiving and stubbing / the process of removing the e-mails from the mail server store, and relocating the physical bits to an archive server, and creating a link so that the end-user can seamlessly retrieve the bits from the archive server instead of the e-mail server.
That solution value proposition is simple and strong.
You can reduce the storage on the primary mail server, which unto itself has many benefits, to many to list, but now your server and server administrators can focus on the main task of a mail server - to "process" e-mail - and not spend expensive cycles on managing storage and all of the sundry IT issues that account for storage management, which are voluminous, complex and expensive.
So, the point, is that the construction of a product to solve this problem is not the same product construction plan that you would necessarily use to solve another distinct problem called eDiscovery. These two are at odds with each other.
Vendors who were focused on pure play e-mail archival are now left flat-footed and looking for third party hooks to help shore up their product lines.
Basic rule, is that re-architecting commerical platforms is difficult, and once you have customers in production it’s literally open heart surgery, so you as the customer now, working with a pure play e-mail archival solution, is really looking at 2 or 3 vendors coming together to solve your business problem.
Both you and the vendor will be constantly challenged with EAI (enterprise application integration) and the final cost of a working solution can be 10x your original license price when it’s all said and done.
Bottom line, is that eDiscovery, legal discovery, compliance elements, storage consequences, cannot be after-thoughts to an e-mail archival due diligence.
The consequences for not considering the bigger picture upfront are costly from a capital expenditure perspective and more importantly the risk to the business for systems which are now error prone due to the inherent disconnects between the varying technologies.
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