Originating Author: Dave Vellante
Email archiving vendors are capitalizing on compliance and legal mandates of corporations. However, the real long-term opportunities in this marketplace lie in creating better ways to handle meta data, scale infrastructure, integrate a variety of messaging technologies and provide facile and speedy access to unstructured data.
Broadly, there are two main opportunities for vendors.
- Infrastructure that provides automatic provenance and single copies of data with high degrees of parallelism and services that can be flexibly invoked by multiple applications.
- Applications that provide value to users by understanding and supporting specific business processes (e.g. eDiscovery, HR, Marketing, R&D).
Importantly, each of these initiatives requires substantially different solutions and strategies.
Action Item: Vendors need to clearly identify their place in the value chain, stake their claims and articulate a vision. Infrastructure vendors need to understand the shifting economics of the business that increasingly emphasize risk reduction. Applications vendors need to provide the flexibility to choose infrastructure services and let markets determine what’s best from an infrastructure standpoint. Vendors should not lock into specific databases and architectures but rather broaden solutions to run on emerging architectures.
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