Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving Shows Vendors Catching On

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving by evaluates vendors offering management of enterprise emails and other files with competitive storage costs. The report is written by Sheila Childs, research director in Gartner's Storage Strategies and Technologies group, and Kenneth Chin, research vice president of Gartner Research.

Childs and Chin write that e-mail has become the predominate application targeted by enterprises when archiving information because e-mail can consume large amounts of storage. However,  the increase in legal discovery associated with e-mail has created a demand for e-mail archiving applications that offer basic e-discovery functionality.

"Enterprises are experiencing rapid growth of user data (stored on file shares), Microsoft SharePoint and other unstructured content," Childs and Chin write. "Much of this content is infrequently accessed after a period of time. Enterprises are looking for products that can deliver policy-based retention management and disposition, as well as legal hold and early case assessment, in a cost-effective way. While records management can help address the retention of static content, it is challenged in managing the volume of content that e-mail and other office productivity tools generate, and many organizations are not mature enough in their records management programs."

The report demonstrates that vendors have responded to  this predicament, and now, many offer e-mail archiving in addition to support for file archiving and SharePoint archiving. The leading vendors within in the Magic Quadrant are taking this expanded information and adding even more support for instant messages, text messages, social networking content and, in some cases, even structured application data.

As a consequence of user demand and the availability of products to address these challenges, Gartner has discontinued the Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving because of vendors addressing this challenges, and is replacing it with the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA).

Since the last Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving, there have been several mergers and acquisitions in the EIA space:

• In September 2009, EMC acquired Kazeon, to offer enhanced e-discovery as part of its SourceOne family of archiving and e-discovery products.
• In February 2010, Iron Mountain bought Mimosa Systems, to offer an on-premises EIA solution. In June 2010, Unify merged with Daegis, to offer enhanced e-discovery capabilities as part of its e-discovery and unified archiving strategy.
• In June 2010, Autonomy bought CA Technologies' information governance business, including its EIA product, CA Message Manager.
• In October 2010, IBM bought PSS Systems for policy management, including the enablement of defensible disposal.

The report notes that many enterprises are starting with email archiving with plans to add support files later.

"Most vendors have added support for Microsoft SharePoint content, but the end-user requirement to archive this content has not fully materialized," Chin and Childs observe. "Vendors are beginning to report SharePoint archiving sales, however, and some vendors, such as EMC, Iron Mountain, Metalogix Software and Symantec, are investing heavily in promoting their SharePoint archiving solutions."

No new vendors were added or dropped in the EIA Magic Quadrant.

The vendors were listed as follows:

The Leaders:
Symantec
Autonomy
Iron Mountain

The Niche Players:
ZL Technologies
Open Text
MessageSolution
Atempo
C2C
HP
Unify
CGS
Metalogix Software
Easy Software

The Visionaries:
IBM

The Challengers:
EMC
CommVault

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