This IDC study provides a preliminary market sizing of the worldwide email archiving applications market in 2007 as well as the forecast for 2008?2012. Coverage includes email archiving applications delivered as software/appliances and hosted services. The updated market size and forecast, including vendor market shares, will be published later in the year.

"The robust year-over-year growth in email archiving applications revenue was primarily stimulated by demands to satisfy legal discovery and compliance issues. Despite these priorities, the importance of storage optimization, management costs, application performance, and scalability is never discounted by the corporate buyers," says Vivian Tero, program manager for Compliance Infrastructure at IDC. "We are seeing corporations moving away from content- or application-specific architectures and gravitating toward an infrastructure approach. These corporations are looking at email archiving in the broader context of their content archiving and information management objectives."

Laura DuBois, program director for IDC's Storage Software program, goes on to point out, "Consistent with this, we are seeing email archiving projects getting initiated in the broader context of eDiscovery, risk and compliance, and security-focused oversight committees. We see smaller firms with many similar objectives but looking for simple, economically viable approaches while addressing the same retention, preservation, availability, and search and discovery requirements."