Vendors need to clearly identify their place in the email archive 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 and over time, increased user productivity. Google-like architectures that write by appending to an existing ‘thread,’ preserve provenance and are highly parallel will gain momentum (many as hosted services).
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.